![]() “The key insight I had,” he wrote in 2004 in his OneNote Blog, “ … was that had to let you capture the thought or piece of info as you had it, without forcing you to deal with any software goo up front.” It is a sign of the charming breeziness of his blog that he refers to his company’s mainstay offerings as “goo.” (Disclosure: I worked on the Word design team at Microsoft in 1999, and when I did, Pratley was a friend and supervisor.) ![]() Chris Pratley, OneNote’s chief designer, saw it differently. ![]() The barrier OneNote aims to surmount is one created by Microsoft’s own success in establishing Word and Outlook, plus the overall Windows file system, as the dominant standards for writing, calendar keeping, and workplace communication.īy Microsoft logic, specific programs are “right” for specific purposes: Word if you are writing something down, Outlook’s Tasks list if you have a to-do item. The tech world has come miles in this direction since the days when you had to learn obscure commands to make a computer do anything at all. At the moment, it exists in a limited version that mainly serves a “dog food” function-that is, its own designers use it for their daily tasks as a forced exposure to its strengths and limitations, a practice known as “eating your own dog food.”īut the programs share a fundamental goal, which is to keep lowering the barrier between the way computers work and the way people naturally think. Chandler has been in the works since 2001, but won’t be ready for mainstream use for at least another year or two. The first release of OneNote went on sale three years ago, and a significantly improved version, OneNote 2007, will be available late this year. Chandler is being designed to run on PCs, Macs, Linux machines, and about any other plausible system. OneNote runs only on PCs or tablet computers with Windows software. Chandler will be free, as will several related utilities and programming tools now being developed by Kapor’s organization. OneNote sells for about $100 on its own and is offered, like Word and Outlook, as part of the “suite” of Office products that is generally regarded as Microsoft’s cash cow. One is from the world’s biggest and most successful software company the other, from a shoestring operation funded mainly by one man-Mitchell Kapor, the founder of Lotus. In all the conspicuous ways, the programs are each other’s opposites. The two programs I have in mind are OneNote, from Microsoft, and Chandler, from the Open Source Applications Foundation, in San Francisco. Personalized touches can be as simple as refining a set of bookmarks for a Web browser, or as complex as assigning long command sequences to a few keystrokes with the very handy PC program ActiveWords.Īnd, as I am shown by previews of two extremely interesting new programs, software can even be intriguing on an aesthetic level, by virtue of the creative choices that go into its design. Interesting software also tends to be extendable, or customizable. (When you are doing key-word searches of files on your own PC, nothing beats the old standby X1, which costs $74.95 and up from X1.com or comes in a slightly different free version from Yahoo, at .) With utilities like DevonThink Professional, for the Macintosh, or dtSearch, for PCs, you can run “semantic searches” for e-mails or files on your own computer and find passages whose themes are related even if they don’t share specific key words. What makes some software “interesting,” as opposed to merely usable? For one, software seems interesting when it allows you to see or consider information in new ways.
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