November 11, 2002

3:52 PM

Diego Dovalhas just announced the first public alpha release of the decidedly non-vaporous PIM-like app: Spaces.

Coming quickly after the announcement of Mitch Kapor and the OSAF's plans for an MS Outlook competitor, Spaces seems to already do a lot of what Chandler has plans to do, but is ready for download and testing right now.

A very cool feature of Spaces is the integration of an RSS new aggregator right alongside the email client. News items and email messages are fundamentally the same and the app takes advantage of that. Spaces is blurring the differences between how we read news and email and it's about time!
posted by antidigerati (9 comments total)

This looks nice. I'm looking forward to seeing the source, but definately non-vapour.

Why source? For something to truly comoditize 'Outlook' we need it to be as stable as other open-source platforms/tools, and to outlast any current "vendor" interest. OpenOffice is a very nice suite, it will survive whatever happens to Sun, so in a similar vein, I'm hoping this will have a decent license as well...
posted by jkaczor at 4:01 PM on November 11, 2002

This looks like Ximian's Evolution which has been doing the RDF/RSS (whatever Dave Winer wants us to call it) feed thing for a while now.
posted by PenDevil at 4:05 PM on November 11, 2002

Ug, more email clients.

How about we get someone working on a some server side technology with a documented interface instead?

"The problem is the user interface." Actually that's way down on the list of what the problem is. The problem is important is interoperability. Period.

Until I can have UNIX, Mac, Windows, and various other platforms that the author of these pieces of software don't care about will we won't see any of these "revolutionary" new concepts stick.

If we could boot-strap this processes by updating existing standards, then we might even have a reasonable path for migration.
posted by betaray at 4:37 PM on November 11, 2002

damnit, helps if you make complete thoughts, that second paragraph is:

"The problem is the user interface." Actually that's way down on the list of what the problem is. The problem is interoperability. Period.
posted by betaray at 4:39 PM on November 11, 2002

Until I can have UNIX, Mac, Windows, and various other platforms that the author of these pieces of software don't care about will we won't see any of these "revolutionary" new concepts stick.

I'm sorry, could you say that again, more plainly?

From a non-techie perspective, it looks like spaces gets at what you're asking for, by running off of Java. Is that not what's happening?
posted by claxton6 at 6:08 PM on November 11, 2002

RSS new aggregator? PIM? Plain english is your friend when it comes to front page posts. Some of us don't speak computer geek.

not that I have anything other than love and respect for computer geeks, mind you :)
posted by boltman at 10:58 PM on November 11, 2002

I'm all for a better email program, but this looks very similar to Evolution, which I use and like, except that it's Java, so it will probably run like a pig. I just don't see why this thing is all that exciting...
posted by Fabulon7 at 6:19 AM on November 12, 2002

blurring the differences between how we read news and email and it's about time!

Awesome - I'll have to check this out. For those interested in further making their email more interactive check out Zoe.

The goal here is to do for email (starting with your personal mailbox) what Google did for the web... The Google principle: It doesn't matter where information is because I can get to it with a keystroke. So what is Zoë? Think about it as a sort of librarian, tirelessly, continuously, processing, slicing, indexing, organizing, your messages.
posted by wfrgms at 10:22 AM on November 12, 2002

Has anyone used PINE? It has blurred the differences between e-mail and news for a long, long, long time...
posted by inksyndicate at 3:36 PM on November 12, 2002