Re: [Gtg-contributors] reciprocity (hamster -> GTG)

[Bryce Harrington <bryce canonical com>]

On Sat, May 15, 2010 at 01:50:38PM +0200, Lionel Dricot wrote:
> Personally, I'm dreaming of a "Personal organizer suite" with stuffs
> like gtg, hamster, a calendar and tomboy (or equivalent), everything
> working together. (I don't mind seeing the "gtg" brand disappearing from
> user sight if needed).
> 
> Of course, this is currently just a dream ;-)

Now that's definitely an *excellent* idea.

However, regarding 'suite' I have some suggestions based on when we gave
this some consideration in Inkscape.  'suite' is kind of a two-edged
sword.  I think the reason it got popular back in the office app wars
was as a lock-in mechanism - i.e. if a user used WordPerfect, they'd
have to use Lotus for spreadsheet even if they preferred Excel, because
WP and Lotus were bundled.

Instead, with Inkscape the approach we took was not a 'suite' but rather
to promote "interoperability standards".  So rather than have something
like a "Gnome Art Suite" we worked with other art app tools to develop
standards for things like palettes to share with Gimp and Scribus, we
split out our clip art library to a separate neutral project
(openclipart.org) that the OpenOffice.org set of tools could pull in,
added import *and* export tools for vector art, and so forth.

I think similarly could be beneficial for gtg and other organization
tools... rather than partner with particular tools in a bundled 'suite'
that limits users from having choices, instead develop standards for
things like tags, time identification ('soon', 'later', etc.), task data
structures, and so on.

One thing that helped this with Inkscape is we identified a conference
that all the app developers attended (the Libre Graphics Meeting), where
we could discuss these things along with users.  So maybe what we need
is a 'Libre Organizer Meeting' where we can meet face to face. ;-)

Bryce