I just wanted to say that I’ve started reading the book, it sounds like a really interesting project. Being involved in the world of software development I can related to your problems. One of the many good things, is that not only have you an open source project, but an “open source history”, where people can learn from the things you’ve done. That’s a huge step in the right direction.

Keep up the good work.

Phil.

I just finished Scott’s book last week, and have been very engrossed in your site, the OSAF/Chandler history the past week. The book does a great job of blending the historical and technical challenges of our industry with the struggle of developing new software, and I really enjoyed having someone revisit and update the various “Laws” of software development in a 21at century context.

All that being said, I am doing some wx/Python/Lucene development myself, and am very interested in learning from, and perhaps contributing to the effort you all have put out there. I’ll definitely see you around the email list and blogs.

Keep on cranking out good stuff, and most importantly, keep the Idea alive!

–Ben

You can subscribe to our mailing lists here, and you can download Chandler from the Chandler “landing page”.

Hope to see you on the lists!

In the past three years, I’ve been a big user of GNOME Evolution, a PIM made mainly for Linux. Evolution is mainly a copycat of Outlook, which is what has made me grow more and more frustrated with it. But Evolution’s mail composer/mail viewing component is really top notch, and their search features in 2.7 were really good (with VFolders/Search Folders and advanced searching capabilities).

I envision the ideal mailer being driven by tagging, labeling and searching, as well as having better abstractions for things like mailing lists and automated system messages. For example, wouldn’t it be cool if mailing lists were downloaded and organized differently from your day-to-day e-mail? Wouldn’t it be cool if every e-mail could be easily tagged the way I tag my bookmarks on del.icio.us? Wouldn’t it be great if when I get a system message telling me about a username/password for a site I registered for, the text is parsed out and I’m asked if I’d like to add a new entry to my password keyring? Also better handling for things like attachments, vcards, ics calendars, and on and on. E-mail could just be such a richer experience with a little thought!

I fear Evolution will never get around to these innovations, mainly due to a bad initial choice of writing the mailer in C using GObject and tying it together using Bonobo. With Python and wxWidgets, I think we’ll have a much easier time.

So, my real question: has any work begun on the Chandler mailer? And regardless of the answer, where can I sign up?

I can’t wait for this next release.. hopefully it will be useful for day to day activity..

Good luck!