Hal Fulton wrote:

> On my wishlist of top 20 things I'd like to do: A PIM for Linux.
>
> Why in Ruby? Silly question. I'd use it no matter the language, but
> if I were working on it, I'd want it to be in Ruby.
>
> The "traditional" PIM has never been of much interest to me -- the
> contact manager, address book, phone book type of thing.
>
> I have used a fairly non-traditional one since 1987. At that time
> it was called Tornado; now it's called Info Select. As with many
> things, not everything in its evolution has been a step forward.
>
> What I like about it:
> 1. It's very good at  handling "totally random," unstructured,
> unformatted information.
> 2. The search capabilities are awesome (and screamingly fast).
>
> But, of course, it's only on Windows and Palm OS. And it has many
> features nowadays that I don't want/need -- some of which I can't
> turn off, either. :/
>
> Anyway, what I have in mind is basically a gigantic pile of virtual
> sticky notes (categorizable into groups). They'd be stored in a
> database and represented onscreen as a bunch of little text widgets.
>
> Possibly the categories would be a tree view on the right... but I
> wouldn't want the items in the tree view. (That's one complaint I
> have with IS -- once you expand a category, the tree view is dominated
> by that list of items and becomes essentially useless.)
>
> Once that was working, I'd be interested in possibly adding some
> hyperlink facilities of some kind.
>
> I'd likely choose FX/Ruby as a GUI, though GTK+ might be better in
> some ways. Hmmm.
>
> Anyone interested in working on this with me??
>
> Hal


Have a look at Leo (http://leo.sf.net) which is a very sophisticated 
Outline Editor written in Python/Tk. It features the category tree (only 
they call it an outline) and unstructered text in the nodes. The good 
thing is, that it can be scripted (though only in Python) and that nodes 
can be 'cloned'  i.e. appear in different places in the outline but 
always point to the same content.

I used it for structuring my thoughts and also for programming tasks. I 
just don't really like the Tk interface.

Cheers,
Carsten