Actiontastic, one of the nicest Desktop GTD apps for Mac users, has gone open source, soon after gaining support for MailTags.

Jon Crosby announced the shift to a free, open source future for Actiontastic in a post on his blog a few days ago:

Opening up this project for community participation is the best possible thing that I can think of doing for its future. Great things are on the horizon for that sweet intersection of the web and the desktop. I would rather discuss them openly and collaborate with other like-minded people than hide any of the details just to make another $29 shareware sale.

Three weeks earlier, he explained how to integrate MailTags with Actiontastic via iCal with Actiontastic’s @inbox calendar. Nifty.

Is the move to open source a good thing? It’s the usual trade-off between free software offering the user community a chance to contribute on the one hand and, on the other, a possible loss of focus and forward movement.

The announcement of Eudora’s move to open source last year made some people nervous about its future for similar reasons.

Hopefully, both apps will continue to thrive.

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Remember a few months ago there was an apparent stampede of people, headed by Mark Pilgrim, who were abandoning Macs for Ubuntu? (Although some later came back.)

Java podcaster Tim Shadel is going the other way , dumping Ubuntu after using Linux for years and stretching his legs into Mac OS X.

Since Mail.app was the straw that broke the camel’s back for Mark Pilgrim, it’s extra interesting to read Tim’s experience with Mail, compared to Evolution, his Linux mail client:

Mail.app is great. Evolution almost works. I have to use exchange at work (I have Ubuntu installed there, too). Evolution has a module to integrate with Exchange, and it sorta thinks about working. It’s slow, and frequently it hangs. So much so that I got sick of typing

ps -ef | grep evolu | grep -v grep | awk ‘{ print $2 }’ | xargs kill

that I put it in a batch file shell script. I ran it no less than twice a day, sometimes more. Calendaring almost worked, except when it didn’t. Frequently I’d send out an appointment only to figure out that my colleagues version of the appointment didn’t repeat over the right interval. I don’t blame anyone for having trouble integrating with a Microsoft product. But at the end of the day, it was still annoyingly brittle. On Mac, there’s Entourage — an M$ product to work with the M$ server. As it is, Mail.app rocks for processing my personal email really efficiently. Oh, and it can export your mail to mbox. Duh. On Ubuntu, mail almost works.

He goes on to list many more ways in which Mac OS X simply provides a superior user experience—searching, wireless, GUI, audio effects, bluetooth and more.

In the end, it’s all about an OS that (wait for it…) “just works”:

My reasons for choosing to dump Ubuntu for a Mac are almost entirely about the experience. After years of Linux work, I’m tired of fiddling. I’m tired of things that almost work. I’m ready for a change. I’m sick of the war to get things to work. I’m ready to simply Get Things Done.

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The latest MacNotables podcast (Adam Engst, Jason Snell, Chuck Joiner et al.) is focussed on the future of the open source Eudora, which is to be rebuilt from the ground up on Thunderbird’s code.

Two long-time Eudora users — Adam Engst (TidBITs) and Jason Snell (MacWorld editor) — talk about what they would like to see in the new version and make a few points on the need for innovation in email programs in general. Eudora users are also encouraged to get involved in the development of the new creation.

The new Eudora will be called Penelope (presumably after the woman (Wikipedia ) who waited for years and years with increasing impatience for her husband Odysseus to come home whilst she fended off a swarm of suitors with various deceits).

It will be a long wait for Eudora users too. Only after two intermediate steps do developers expect to release Penelope 1.0. And only then,

once we finish version 1.0, we will divide our attention between bringing over some of the more obscure Eudora features and customizations, and doing new work.

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Qualcomm has announced that future versions of its email client Eudora will be open-source, and provides more details on the development in a FAQ.

The company is in discussion with the Mozilla Foundation, hoping to base future Windows and Mac versions of Eudora on Thunderbird’s code. It expects that the open-source Eudora will be available sometime in the first half of 2007.

Eudora was once one of the most popular Mac email clients. Back when I was using Pegasus Mail on a 286, many Macheads were enjoying the power and flexibility of Eudora.

According to MacWorld, the original developer of Eudora Steve Dorner is pleased with the development:

Using the Mozilla Thunderbird technology platform as a basis for future versions of Eudora will provide some key infrastructure that the existing versions lacked, such as a cross-platform code base and a world-class display engine. Making it open source will bring more developers to bear on Eudora than ever before.

In the meantime Qualcomm is pushing the last commercial release of Eudora 6.2.4 for Mac out the door at the reduced price of USD 19.95 including six months of support.

[Via MacWorld after a tip-off from Bronson. Thanks!]

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The Apple and open source / open file format debate continues.

Tim Bray, Director of Web Technologies at Sun Microsystems, made a contribution that drew some attention. He is going to switch to Linux.

Rui Carmo at Tao of Mac also has some interesting things to say. He argues that Open Format is the real issue here, not open-sourced apps.

Still, he can’t help wondering if,

… Mail.app (for one) wouldn’t be considerably better than it currently is if its core bits had half the exposure that WebKit has, or if iChat would have had a chance to evolve to become the standards-uncompliant mess that it is if it were based off Gaim or, better still, the odd-named application that replaced Gnomemeeting.

I have a feeling that they would at least be more interoperable with other stuff, which entails having the decency of supporting IMAP IDLE and SIP/H.323 properly - and hopefully causing considerably less pain to their users.

Making Mail.app more open to developers was one of the key desires that emerged from the “Talking Mail.app” interviews with John Gruber, Merlin Mann, Scott Morrison, drunkenbatman, Leander Kahney, Brent Simmons, et al.

Of course, wishing don’t make it so, but it’s still fun to wonder.

What if?

Related posts

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John Gruber and Mark Pilgrim are having a very public and very excellent conversation about Apple and file formats, proprietary and open.

Mark Pilgrim announced that he was switching from OS X to Ubuntu, citing the ever-advancing proprietary creep in Apple as the main reason for his switch. Apple “just doesn’t get it” when it comes to open file formats.

Uproar. Not least because of Pilgrim’s reputation as a long-standing Mac guru.

John Gruber responded to the post, arguing that “Apple gets it / Apple doesn’t get it” is too crude a view:

The question isn’t “Does Apple get it?”, but “Does Apple get it enough?” …. [W]hile it is easy to find ways to complain that Apple is not open enough — under-documented and undocumented security updates and system revisions, under-documented and undocumented file formats — it would be hard to argue with the premise that Apple today is more open than it has ever been before. (Exhibit A: the Web Kit project.)

But there are things that could be better, should be better, but aren’t, and it’s hard to ascribe these policies to anything other than management that is, at best, indifferent to issues related to openness.

Interesting as this all is (and there is a lot more of it—you should read the posts on both sites), I am posting this because it turns out that Mail.app played a crucial role in Pilgrim’s decision to switch.

In his response to John’s response, Mark writes that Mail 2.0 finally forced his decision to switch:

And then came Tiger, and Mail.app 2.0. In Mac OS X 10.4, Apple deliberately changed Mail.app to use their proprietary .emlx data format, apparently to work around the limitations of Spotlight. Mail.app 2.0 helpfully auto-converted all my wonderful mbox files into Apple’s shitty undocumented format. I’m now in the process of undoing the damage….

This was really the last straw for me. I was already feeling vaguely dissatisfied with Apple; now I feel actively betrayed. By the time I even realized what had happened (a year after buying OS X 10.4), it was too late. Now I’m forced to migrate all my mail yet again from yet another proprietary format, and the best documentation I’ve found so far is on LiveJournal. Jesus H. Christ, somebody deserves to be fired for that.

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