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Originally Posted by Zanth /img/forum/go_quote.gif
I still haven't found anything that works as well as Ecco by Netmanage. Now free, it is quite old and is windows only. I have it running with Wine in Ubuntu and I suppose I could do the same with Codeweaver's proggies on my mac, but I would just love something that compares with the speed and simplicity of Ecco. I use iCal and Mail mainly because of Spotlight, but honestly, why can't a company match the brilliance of this great program? Maybe something does exist and I'm totally in the dark? If so (particularly Wodgy) please enlighten me. My boss uses Ecco exclusively in his office environment and is really fearful the day a Windows OS release lacks support for old 32 bit programs.
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You have a great boss if he uses Ecco
The Ecco open source project fell through due to mismanagement at Netmanage (what's new?), but there has been a pretty fantastic new development... a group of hackers got together and hacked together a low-level interface to Ecco called "eccoext". It does a whack of neat things, but one of the big ones is it lets you write routines in Lua (a lightweight scripting language) that lets you assign categories conditionally, based on an item's contents. Ecco has always had a scripting interface, and Python, etc. bindings exist, but eccoext takes this further. It's worth looking into for Ecco fans.
BTW, your fears about compatibility may end up coming true... Ecco does not work on 64-bit Vista. It runs fine on 32-bit Vista however, and you can always run it in a virtual machine. Then of course, the OS doesn't matter.
There is a guy in Montreal who's working on a modern Ecco replacement that's actually not vaporware... it's in beta and you can try it out. It's called SQLnotes. I personally haven't tried it yet, and I disagree with some of the developer's design goals (particularly with respect to usability), but it is an interesting development. I hope he can finish it. It's a lot to bite off for a single programmer.
Here's a fantastic table comparing Ecco, Ecco+eccoext, and SQLnotes:
http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dqmp2rv_26gpc2hb
As for Chandler, it could have been something like Ecco, it really could have. The beauty of Lotus Agenda (the predecessor to Chandler) and Ecco were their elegant data models. Instead, the Chandler developers chose to go for a baroque data model that is halfway towards Outlook... data types have schema (bundles of fields) and you can "stamp" an item with multiple schema. It's not really appealing to me. And it doesn't have the hierarchical element of Ecco. I think it's the classic example of a project built by people with a consultant/architect's mindset, rather than just a bunch of smart people who want to build something. That's part of the reason it's still not out of beta after six years of development.
As for Mac apps, OmniFocus is getting closer to Ecco. I think they're a little hobbled by devotion to David Allen's "GTD" methodology though... it would have a much more elegant model if they scrapped the next action concept. And of course it needs to be able to add custom columns, and the perspectives window would be better implemented as Ecco-style tabs (though you can add perspectives to the toolbar in OmniFocus). But it's not bad if your use of Ecco is project/task management.
I'm personally looking forward to the systemwide todo datastore in Leopard. Add some integration in OmniOutliner to that datastore, then add filters (hopefully in the next version), and you'd have most of Ecco. Add cloning and you'd get even closer.
