The Chandler Project Blog

If you haven’t already, try out the new 0.7.5 desktop interface.

We’ve stripped out quite a bit of chrome. In many ways, the Preview release was an experiment. We threw out ideas out in order to see what would stick. 0.7.5 is what stuck.

But simplicity is more complex than that.

The changes we’ve made have simplified the interface. But there is simplicity at the workflow and information modeling levels of application to consider as well, and that simplicity isn’t new.

With a new, pared down UI, we’re hoping more users will discover the underlying simplicity at the heart of the application.

What do I mean by underlying simplicity?

There are tools that are simple at the conceptual and user interface level, but complex when it comes to workflow and information management.

Not to pick on email, but email is one of them. Email concepts are simple: Send and Receive messages. Reply-to and Forward messages. However what ensues from this simplicity is a propensity to divide and multiply; which results in the overflowing, hard to parse, hard to manage Inboxes we love to hate. Email begets more email and we’re responding with all kinds of ways to keep the onslaught under control: Auto-filtering strategies, tagging and categorization schemes and Inbox kung-fu processing techniques.

By contrast, Chandler aims to tame your inbox by reducing the volume of information bits you generate (individually and as a group).

Imagine if…

• Instead of starting up new emails every time you have a new thought on an old problem; you could keep editing emails after they’ve been sent/received.
• Instead of copying and pasting information from email onto your calendar; you could take emails and put them directly on the calendar to mark event dates, deadlines and important milestones.
• Instead of resending information to yourself as reminders; you could set alarms on the emails you already have so that they arrive again in your Inbox at the time of your choosing.
• Instead of duplicating information in order to get it into all the right places; you could file messages into multiple folders so that the same email showed up in all the contexts you need it to: Invoices, status, by project; your stuff, your spouse’s stuff, errands list, etc.
• Instead of having a forest of flagged items crowding out new messages in your Inbox; you could cordon off the things you’re working on NOW from stuff that can wait until LATER.

To be clear, Chandler still isn’t meant to replace your email application. Instead, email to us, has served as an invaluable design-model for the best and the worst in information management and collaboration. Studying it carefully is how we think we can make Chandler a compelling alternative to email. See more detailed analysis.

So, instead of scattering your thoughts across dozens of email messages, text files, calendars and task lists, try putting them into Chandler and try out some of the scenarios described above.

(Stay tuned for a more detailed analysis and an illustrative scenario of how Chandler can simplify the information in your life.)

This entry was posted on Friday, April 4th, 2008 at 4:04 am and is filed under Product Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.