My first thought on watching the demo was: This seems a lot like Lotus Notes.
The author claims this is a compliment, but generally Notes has a terrible reputation as one of the most over-architected and misused software solutions of the '90s.
You can check it out (in excruciating detail) at this Interface Hall of Shame article from 1999:
I would like to counterpoint. I knew quite a few people I trusted who sang the praises of Lotus Notes.
It was the IBM buyout that started the big downfall.
> all the insane GUIs built using the tools?
Remember VB6 and all the shitty applications written in that? Uh, yeah. And don't get me started on the disasters that people perpetrated on us from the web. And how about the pile of dogshit that was Gtk v1? <shudder>
In addition, this was also still the time of "look and feel" lawsuits.
Everybody had insane GUI's in the 1990's, so singling out Lotus Notes is far from fair.
IBM (Lotus) Notes / Domino does have a fairly elegant core in the form of a high-performance "NoSQL" document database with fast and reliable multi-master replication. The problem was that the development tools they build on top of that database were bizarre and terrible, and then they used those tools to build an e-mail client with poor usability.
The page deals with Lotus Notes as an email system, which is the only thing many places used it for. The email client was awful, but it was one part of a larger application platform that offered a client-server replicated database, a user interface toolkit, and document browsing. If you think of it as attempting to scratch some of the same itches that the Web and wikis do, you'll understand it more.
The author claims this is a compliment, but generally Notes has a terrible reputation as one of the most over-architected and misused software solutions of the '90s.
You can check it out (in excruciating detail) at this Interface Hall of Shame article from 1999:
http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/index.php?file=lotus.htm&mode=or...
It starts off with: "We wish we found IBM's Lotus Notes a long time ago. This single application could have formed the basis for the entire site."
Maybe there was an elegant core to Notes that was hidden under all the insane GUIs built using the tools? Would be interesting to hear more.