Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years...

I was looking at the Wikipedia entry for Lotus Agenda. It mentions Beeswax, which I knew about, and also another project called Chandler. Click, Click…

OMYGOD !!!

Mitch Kapor, one of the original designers of Agenda, seems to have funded a massive project to re-write Agenda into a multi-platform version.

He kept a blog. In an early posting in 2002, he talks about the project, and mentions that a small team had been working on the design for a year, and the legendary programmer Andy Hertzfeld, a key designer of the original Macintosh, had already built a prototype.

The project had a huge vision. Kapor created the “Open Source Applications Foundation” (OSAF), It was all about open-source and open-standards, and involved many of the best software minds in Silicon Valley.

The Chandler project invited Scott Rosenberg of Salon.com to be an embedded journalist. And he wrote a book about it. ‘Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software. You can read the first two chapters online.

The book covers the period from 2002 to 2005. At the end of 2005, the project had still not written any usable code. I’ve ordered a copy, it sounds scarier than a Stephen King novel.

The Chandler project laboured on past the book’s publication. In 2008, Kapor pulled the funding and resigned from the board (here’s his blog entry). There is still a Chandler Website where you can read about the project and download a copy.

The Chandler Linux builds are for old versions of Ubuntu, no one seems to be minding the shop anymore. I didn’t have the stamina to download the source and try to get it working on a current version, so grabbed the Windows executable onto my little Netbook.

Runs nicely, but… at first glance, it’s just a very ordinary personal organizer. Has a nice ‘Now-Later-Done’ feature. It's... nice.

Well, that certainly throws down the gauntlet. I’m building roughly the same application, with roughly the same design goals as Chandler - capture Agenda’s awesome functionality, run on all platforms, provide for sharing, etc.

Chandler had the best brains in the business working on their project. Mitch Kapor was the original designer of Lotus Agenda - he understood that software challenge better than anyone on the planet. The project was well funded, OSAF burned through millions of dollars over the course of seven years. And if nothing else, they were certainly persistent.

I’m a retired old fart working by myself, coding a few hours a day in my underwear. No funding. And I need to finish this by September because I’m going back to University.

We’ll see.