Hemispheres | Cyber Sidebar: Mitch Kapor has seen the future. Again.

Hemispheres | Cyber Sidebar: Mitch Kapor has seen the future. Again. "Mitch Kapor has seen the future. Again. The visionary software developer who two decades ago invented Lotus 1-2-3, the spreadsheet that helped spark the personal computer boom, is now creating another seminal program. Code-named Chandler (after the mystery writer Raymond Chandler), this ambitious new application is as remarkable for how it’s being developed as for the computing future it promises.
Tentatively scheduled for release in December 2004, Chandler aims to change the way you see, access, use—and even think about—information on your computer. Precisely how it achieves this is still on the drawing board, but Chandler will let you sort and interrelate all manner of data in a free-form way, from e-mails, tasks, contacts, spreadsheets, and other documents to instant messages, Web logs, photos, and MP3 music files. And a great deal more.
As Kapor has described it: “Users will be able to organize diverse kinds of information for their own convenience—not the computer’s convenience. Chandler will have a rich ability not only to associate and interconnect items, but also to gather and collect related items in a single place, creating a context-sensitive ‘view’ of many types of data.” The goal, in other words, is to have interactions with your computer go from an organizational nightmare of frustrating searches and misplaced files to a desktop dream built on intuitive grouping of information, enabling quantum leaps in creativity."

Good Chandler snapshot/update, via Ted Leung