Agenda: a personal information manager (1990) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Agenda: a personal information manager (1990) [pdf]

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74 pointshggh43 comments

Open-source Treesheets on Win/Linux/Mac combines a spreadsheet and outliner. Fast 2-D UX from the creator of a 3-D game engine, https://strlen.com/treesheets/docs/screenshots.html & https://hn.algolia.com/?query=treesheets & https://github.com/aardappel/treesheets

1990's doogiePIM for Win continues to receive regular updates from an indie developer, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18120483 & https://bitespire.com. $135 perpetual license or $7/mo sub, with 1990s copywriting.

> doogiePIM is a sophisticated, encryption-enhanced personal information manager, uniquely tailored not merely for securing your data within the sanctuary of local storage but for enriching and preserving the fertile grounds of your creative and intellectual pursuits. Envision it as an Artist's Palette or a Scholar's Codex, where the essence of creativity and knowledge coalesce.

Can it implement {MYN & GTD}?

They have a KB article on GTD: https://help.bitespire.com/portal/en/kb/articles/harnessing-...

A pioneering DOS PIM succeeded by Ecco Pro for Windows and a spectacular resurrection flameout, via Mitch Kapor's Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF Chandler). You can still download and run Agenda, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24862343

Thanks to Roam Research, we now have Bear Notes, Obsidian, Logseq et al for bi-directional linking, https://maggieappleton.com/bidirectionals

OSS Wildland was promising, but seems to have entered Rust rewrite limbo, https://wildland.io/2023/01/16/WL2023.html

And of course, Emacs Org Mode.

These retrospectives make me upset about the software industry today. The PIM software today isn’t any better than it was 20-30 years ago, and in many respects it’s worse. Electron-based trash that doesn’t do half of what Lotus or even Outlook did years ago. (Quite literally—the new web based trash version of Outlook has blank spots in the user interface for missing features that were in the old version.) We are living in “Idiocracy” and don’t even realize it.

Alarmingly, 1990 is 34 years ago. Though I still think of it as 20-30 as well.

I still think of 1990 as 10 years ago and refuse to believe otherwise

I never used Outlook back in the day. But indeed, now that I'm forced to use the web version, I find it hard to believe that they are pushing such trash on so many millions of users.

How can it lack such basic things as properly quoting the message you're replying to (be it with > symbols, a vertical line or whatever) or knowing what email address an incoming message is actually directed to (this can be achieved by going deep into the menus to show the raw email text, but come on).

All those things were common when I started using email, maybe around 25 years ago. They shouldn't be rocket sience.

And anyway, it's still not as annoying as that steaming pile of trash called Teams... it's sad how low Microsoft's QA has fallen.

it's sad how low Microsoft's QA has fallen.

Microsoft famously got rid of their QA teams, what, ten or fifteen years ago? Not that you’d notice…

It’s funny because their QA was already mocked for how bad it was back in the 1990s.

Used by small law firms, Ecco Pro (built by 4 people in Bellevue, WA) was killed by Outlook, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecco_Pro

> Ecco Pro was originally developed by Pete Polash, who had sold an early Macintosh based presentation program to Aldus and Bob Perez, a Harvard-trained lawyer hired by Apple as a programmer and Evangelist in the 1980s. It was first released in 1993 by Arabesque Software, Inc., based in Bellevue, Washington. PC Magazine awarded ECCO Pro their Editor's Choice award in 1996 and 1997.

> Development by NetManage ceased in 1997 after the July 1997 release of version 4.01. Andrew Brown wrote in The Guardian: "So what happened to the paragon of a program? The market killed it. First it was sold to a much larger company, Netmanage; presumably doing this made the original programmers a lot of money. Then Netmanage panicked when Microsoft Outlook came along as a "free" part of the Office suite, and killed development on the program." NetManage chief executive officer Zvi Alon noted that 'As soon as Microsoft decided to give away Outlook with Office, we started getting phone calls questioning the value of Ecco Pro'.

Ecco was so beloved that it was binary patched to enable Lua scripting, a decade after being killed. It was virtually bug free and continues to work today on Windows, Linux+Wine and macOS+Crossover. It was so well designed that even though it predated the internet, it could be trivially extended to support hyperlinks. The main limitations after 20 years of zero maintenance are max db size and lack of scalable fonts.

In 2023, an open-source PIM inspired by Ecco Pro reached v1.0 status after 14 years, built on Qt with binaries available for Win/Linux/Mac, https://github.com/rochus-keller/CrossLine

  CrossLine is an outliner with sophisticated cross-link capabilities in the tradition of the well-respected Ecco Pro. It implements the concept of "Transclusion" proposed by Ted Nelson and - among others - implemented in the legendary Objectory SE tool by Ivar Jacobson. It is also a full text database with built-in search engine.

"Small law firms" seem to have a history of adopting and hanging on to specific software. IIRC they used Wordperfect for years after Word had taken over almost all other business and personal word processing, because there were so many legal templates for Wordperfect and they didn't want to abandon what was working for them.

If contracts are "code for human behavior", then legal templates are a well-tested code base. Wordperfect had great support for formatting codes. Looks like it's still a feature being developed for lawyers, https://www.wordperfect.com/en/licensing/legal/

> An all-time favorite feature just got even better! Reveal Codes window now displays codes for font attributes and text alignment features in table cells, rows, and columns. In addition, cell and row codes appear before table text in the Reveal Codes window, delivering a clearer picture of what font and alignment formatting has been applied.

Ecco Pro is great for manually linking items in multiple locations within a complex hierarchy, with one change reflected everywhere. Hard to walk away from a well organized database of research or writing.

Scrivener has been praised for complex writing projects, e.g. worldbuilding for novels and screenplays. Looks like lawyers use it too, https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener/overview

Oh, man, thanks for the CrossLine reference. As a formerly big user of Ecco Pro, I look forward to giving it a whirl this afternoon.

You mostly had me at "Transclusion" (an unfortunate terminology in retrospect come to think of it, I wish Ted Nelson would offer a substitute term. Hyperthogonal transaction? idk)

Regardless of the social changes in recent decades, I think it is silly to decide to reserve the root "trans-" for a certain group when it has historically had multiple meanings. Correct me if you had some other reason.

I've installed CrossLine and read CrossLineDemo.cldb, but can't find anything that might be described as transclusion. The "Transclusion" outline in CrossLineDemo.cldb is just a copy of a Wikipedia page and does not mention CrossLine. Because the outline named "Ecco Pro" says, "Data is stored as discrete objects, and can be dragged as dynamic links to multiple folders creating cross references," I tried in CrossLine to drag an item to a different folder or a different outline, but no joy.

Can someone explain how CrossLine enables transclusion?

Haven't installed CrossLine recently, maybe file a github issue for docs/faq? Drag-and-drop might have OS-specific quirks.

2018 comment by the developer suggests pasting, https://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/8438/0/crossli...

> if the outline is in the same repository, CrossLine supports live transclusion, i.e. the transcluded items immediately update when the source is changed; if the outline is in a different repository, the item is pasted as a static link, i.e. the text is pasted and doesn’t change unless you manually change it (CTRL+SHIFT+L). Live transclusion links have a blue background color while static links have normal background, blue font and are underlined.

> Note that there are two ways of transcluding: either as alias items or inlined items. You can create the former by selecting one or more items, then clicking on the handle of the item under which you want the alias, then CTRL+SHIFT+V; the latter are simply created instead by pasting into the text of another item.

Fascinating story! I’d love something like this with PDF integration (a file format that has become deeply embedded within all aspects of legal practice).

I appreciate the overall sentiment, but the Electron hate seems misplaced here. HTML/CSS/JS on desktop apps opens a whole world for UI/UX design. Not that this opportunity has been fully capitalized on, but it's a good thing nonetheless.

It's not a good thing. Desktop apps that don't adhere to the UI/UX conventions of the platform they run on almost universally suck.

No they don’t. They’re slow and bloated, defy platform conventions (like drag & drop), and enable a low skill class of web developers to create crappy desktop “apps.”

HTML/CSS/JS is less capable than native development. It limits, not expands, what desktop application designs can do.

There was such an explosion of PIMs and PDAs in the 90s I seem to remember...

My Dad went through loads of different bits of software (paid for by work)...

I can remember Ecco, Sidekick, Packrat as names, and I'm sure there were more that were more closely tied to PDAs like Psion and Palm in the later 90s...

I was an early and long-time Lotus user. It was the first app that made me feel like these personal computers really can make a dramatic productivity boost. I had enough interaction with the team at Lotus in Boston that they gave me a peek at screenshots of the Windows version. (Code-named “Hobbs” as in Calvin and.). There never was a good replacement for Lotus so it was painful when I had to accomplish the same work working across multiple apps.

While trying to recall the relationship between Lotus Notes and Lotus Agenda ("which came first?" etc.) I just dug up this[0] comment from a different Notes-related HN discussion a few months ago that also mentions 'Chandler'[1] - an OSS implementation written in Python:

> [Chandler] is inspired by a PIM from the 1980s called Lotus Agenda, notable because of its "free-form" approach to information management. Lead developer of Agenda, Mitch Kapor, was also involved in the vision and management of Chandler.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39070631 / "For a moment there, Lotus Notes appeared to do everything a company needed"

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandler_(software)

The millions invested in P2P OSAF/Chandler indirectly shipped a great book :) https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/01/21/the-big-picture/ & https://www.chandlerproject.org/screenshots/

There was also the Groove Networks desktop client from Ray Ozzie, a Chandler-esque P2P successor to Lotus Notes, acquired by Microsoft, https://fortune.com/2015/12/21/microsoft-buys-ray-ozzie-talk... & https://www.crn.com/news/applications-os/22104480/crn-interv...

> Groove File Sharing.. projects the concept of sharing and synchronization and conversation directly into Windows Explorer so every Windows folder now has a Groove button in it and if you press it, you turn that folder into a workspace that shares that folder with other people inside or outside the company, puts red marks on files, lets you have chats and conversations privately within that folder, it projects all the platform capabilities of Groove right into the file system. It lets people share folders across all their computers, whether at home or at work..

I remember doing realtime collaboration in Groove in the early 2000s, and it was magical — this was doing what Google Docs, Figma etc. only accomplished much, much later.

Unfortunately, Groove was also obviously too much of a toy app back then. The whiteboard app was too simple, the word processor was too simple, and so on. It was an office suite but it could do almost nothing. The vision was extremely impressive, but the apps never evolved to compete with real office apps.

Another product that was way ahead of its time and failed in spite of it, or because of it.

I'm still using iCal and vCard for this, by way of simple open source apps on mobile and desktop synced by WebDAV. Even use them for tasks/todos and notes (vjournal).

Always amazes me people are still rolling their own versions of these standards, the problem was solved years ago.

But there’s no vendor lock-in with open standards…

There is that.

Am I misunderstanding what "open standard" means? Why don't vCard and iCalendar count?

I was being sarcastic. vCard and iCal are open standards - and that is probably why there are not used by many. Because many vendors like vendor lock-in.

Got it - thought you were saying vendor lock-in meant the standards were de facto not open (which seemed unfair, the standards are transparent and not unusually difficult to implement).

Always interesting to see how these small screens can display a relatively large amount of information so nicely.

What is the state of the art in this category today? Apple notes? Outlook?

Notes: Obsidian, Logseq and other markdown clones of Roam Research ($165/yr, DevonThink (native iOS/macOS non-sub), Bear Notes ($20/yr).

Notes + Calendar: OmniFocus, 2DoApp (native iOS/macOS non-sub).

https://old.reddit.com/r/bearapp/comments/o57g7o/obsidian_v_...

> DEVONthink is superb for non-markdown files (it’s decent at Markdown too) .. One plus to Obsidian is it’s all Markdown files so while not every feature will work in other editors you can mix and match with iA, nvUltra, DEVONthink, Typora, Taio, etc. it’s something that isn’t an option with Bear or Craft as proprietary SQLite and JSON formats respectively, both have great export options though.. Obsidian to me feels a bit like a jailbroken iOS device with too many Cydia system tweaks installed. It's great fun, and endless exploration of cool features, but stuff breaks and starts feeling clunky.

Lotus Agenda: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Agenda

> Its flexibility proved to be its weakness. New users confronted with so much flexibility were often overpowered by the steep learning curve required to use the program.

I wonder if Notion may suffer a similar fate?

Sounds similar to trying out emacs/org-mode for the first time. I think such flexible programs do well with the help of crowdsourced/community-based conventions; Notion templates, YouTube videos of Obsidian vault tours, and blogs about org-mode workflows and use cases, for example.

be careful here. you may end up spending too much time organizing your notes, and too little time getting things done.

In general, for me at any rate, having some simple even handwritten to do lists and some basic calendaring get me 90% of the way there. I was just never able to get into any of the systems out there like daytimers and getting things done.

I had a work colleague who religiously used a Palm Pilot to track to do items… which was invariably a lengthy list of overdue items.

These things are great for academics or professionals in certain fields. They need ways to organize, reference, and write (or otherwise create) from a large corpus of knowledge and experience notes. They are motivated to learn to use these tools because that's they only way to manage their work.

The average person just doesn't deal with enough stuff to make it worth their while, even if they can figure it out. They may be perfectly capable of using it, but find it's too much for their needs. A person writing letters and short stories wouldn't use a desktop publishing package, it just doesn't fit their needs. Most people are content with editing their photos with simple tools rather than working with Photoshop.

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