I recently read, or at least listened to via Audible, the book Dreaming in Code by Scott Rossenberg (http://www.dreamingincode.com). This book is a great insight into the problems that have plagued software development since the dawn of time (or at least the 60’s).
The book follows the development of Chandler, an open source project by the Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF) that attempted to develop a Personal Information Manager (PIM) that captured the spirit of Lotus Agenda.
This project was led by the founder of Lotus, Mitch Kapor (http://www.kapor.com/), and tracked their development for a period of time.This is a good book for programmers and non-programmers alike and I personally felt that Rossenberg captures the old question of “Why can be just build software like we build bridges?”. He does point out that not all bridges development projects run smoothly.
Technology is dynamic which makes it very easy to change technologies, development platforms and functionality during the development cycle. I believe that this is one of the main problems facing software developers today. When you build a bridge…its a bridge, you don’t sit down in a conference room and decide that it will become an office building half way through the project.
The Chandler project open source page is still up and can be found at http://chandlerproject.org. According to Wikipedia the project became inactive about 2010 about the time the funding was pulled. The last blog post was on July 30th, 2009.
I downloaded Chandler for my iMac to play around with it and for the most part its a regular PIM. It does have one really good design element, which is the Create a Note Feature. You just type some something in like “I need to setup a meeting with Michelle”. This is then stored quickly and you can then change the note type later on. For example, you can change it into an email of a calendar event.