Submitted by Pierre_Admin on 2009/01/22 13:30
I came across this really neat Chandler Wiki entry:
 
Chandler (does it presentation?) was/is a huge project. Large team, years of work, mega money. The result... I'll let others judge as I have not looked at it in detail.
 
But any large project with bright minds is something useful to pull as much from as possible. I haven't read it all yet (will post back), but quoting from the first page:
  1. In some sense, data systems are elaborate tracking devices, providing ways for you to describe your data when you put it in so that you can find it again when you need to take it out.
  2. In a less common, but equally important case, data organization is about pulling information together so you can see them in a single view.
  3. As search improves and tag and label-based systems like Gmail, delicious and flickr become more mainstream, fewer and fewer people will feel the need to resort to actively filing items into folders
  4. Is Google really the end of road?
  5. What's missing from this picture are the guts of why people bother with capital-O Organization: To wrap their head around their data. To take their data, synthesize it and turn it into something that is greater than the sum of its parts.
  6. It's a free country, if people need to Organize their data, they should be allowed to do so and software should provide tools to do so as well. (...) Problems arise however when people are forced to make do in one-size-fits-all organizational paradigms that are supposed to be generic, panaceic solutions to all your information management and organizational needs.
  7. Scenario 1: Describing items for targeted search and retrieval. Here, individual items, not groupings of items are of primary importance. The groupings are just a means to an end, a way to find the individual item. (...) You then want to structure the groupings so that the kinds of items you look for the most (ie. emails from your boss) are also the most easily accessible groupings in the structure.
  8. Scenario 2: Pulling items together into an explicit grouping, the grouping is of primary importance and the consituent items important only because they have been pulled together. In other words, in explicit groupings, the whole is greater than the sum of the individual parts. Explicit groupings are often time-sensitive, in preparation for some event: a meeting, an email to send. More often than not, explicit ordering really matters, there is a chain relationships with very specific dependencies between the items, ie. a conversation thread, a thread of task dependencies, etc. Explicit groupings are usually structured so that the groupings that you need to look at the most (ie. Prep for next staff meeting) are the most easily accessible. Since explicit groupings are often temporal, the set of groupings that "you need to look at most" is likely to change frequently over time.
Many of IQ's features are in line with these: (referencing the same numbers)
  1. Field values allow you to add info to your items, to easily retrieve them
  2. As items are separate pieces of information, and as showing the hierarchy is optional, you can group items, loosely related (or even unrelated) into a single view
  3. Live search (and advanced search) provide a quick retrieval method
  4.  
  5. I think that IQ excels at turning info into something greater than the sum of its parts
  6. With hierarchies, multiple parents, recursion, in-grid links (to items, wikitags, web pages, emails), unlimited hyperlink fields, flexible and grid-specific formatting and rich-text HTML pane (and eventually links in the HTML pane, related items links), IQ is flexible enough to handle a wide variety of user preferences and tasks
I'll update this blog as I read more of this very interesting wiki entry.
 
Any comments?

Comments

I really, really like IQ a lot.
 
However, I am most worried about the accessibility and bringing people over. I am a newer user and trying to work with the calendar and be able to post grids. I think getting outsiders into the basics of IQ is a big deal. To me this means (partially) that the most common aspects of what the target audience uses needs to be easy - calendaring, project/task management, email, sync and random ideas/notes.
 
Chandler has been in process for a long time and I think addresses certain issues, like always focusing to the Now section, but IQ has features for that as well. Still, however well done, Chandler is just a fancy calendar with tasks, but one that incorporates good ideas for that area.
 
I think the bigger part is the UI of Chandler.... the look, feel, drag&drop. IQ is still very much in Ecco look and feel of the 90s. What makes is more accessible is that most things that have to be done, are easy to do. For example, a novice file could be set up that has many preprogramming options that many people request.  For example, I downloaded IQ in late Nov and several times have seen people (including myself) wonder how to change color when the status of an item changes.
 
(3)
I do think IQ needs some type of integrated tagging. As more programs use tagging, more new users will expect it as well. I like something like tag2find because it forces me to define tags that i use. IQ could have tags that a user can organize as well. I think that would be even more powerful. I used to use a program called powermarks and this is a great example too.As it is now, I can not (or at least I do not know how) to choose the fields the search screen shows me. That would be a big help to me as well.
 
You are busy and working on the nuts and bolts of the system. And I agree with Tom that when you get to your defined release-able stage of 1.0, this areas will come up for review: UI, documentation, examples. Hopefully, we are helping.
 

I took a long look at Chandler some years ago, it had some good and novel features and one big disadvantage.  If you had more than a couple of hundred articles it was hideously slow even on a fast gaming desktop computer it was still hideously slow, on an underpowered machine it was slow to the point of unusability.
 
The speed seemed to be proportional to 1/n2 where n = the number of articles.
 

Pierre_Admin

2018/11/10 12:04

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Gosh, 2009... what a run down on memory lane !
 
Hundreds of developers and couldn't even build something that scaled well...
 
Pierre_Admin
IQ Designer
 

 I remember Chandler well. They have a very beautiful synopsis of what the ultimate PIM would look like, how it would handle data and so on. A great example of how easy it is to imagine something, vs making it happen. I'd read the synopses and then download the "program", let's just say there was a slight difference between the two ;-).

 The good news is the dream of Chandler was realized. It's called IQ.

Pierre_Admin

2018/11/13 12:18

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[quote=David_H]
 The good news is the dream of Chandler was realized. It's called IQ.
[/quote]