Whew, finally this version is finished and available for download. It took a lot of effort and much longer than I ever imagined. I've made many mistakes, but also learned a lot.

This is a technology preview release. It demonstrates the platform with most important ideas implemented. It's possible to define different types and views, but there are only few extensions available. Read release notes for details.

A little bit about us

Sider is the work of two people. My name is Slava Ivanyuk and I do most of the development. I write all code, documentation, organize design documents, etc. My partner, Igor, mostly helps by giving ideas and testing Sider. It was his idea to develop a flexible platform with potential to support any type of information.

What's next?

My next steps are to take a short break, do a post-mortem (maybe I'll blog about it) and start moving toward next release. We plan to improve Sider to the point where it has wider practical use. That means adding some features, but mostly focusing on creating extensions. Here's a list of few major things we will be working on. We'll finish adding more details to wiki roadmap sometime soon.

• Move to .NET 2 - At least evaluate the move, but most likely we will do it. It offers many improvements over .NET 1.1, not only in general but also to work with XML. Eventually Sider will move to it and the sooner the better. My only concern is possible delay it might introduce. Most likely, we will move to it in several stages.
• Persistent user options - Right now, most customization is done through extensions. We want to add application-wide settings.
• Support packages - A package is a collection of different extensions. Each package would focus on providing support for specific scenarios, like note management, project management, collections, etc.

Upcoming packages

These are just a few ideas of popular uses we want to support with Sider.

• Note management - There're many programs to work with notes, but none of them get it quite right. We want to have a flexible system that would support graphs (like wikis) of notes, tagging, filtering, etc.
• Journal - People often use notes to track progress, to capture thoughts on the topic over time, instead of creating a system for referencing information. Journal will feature special notes, with views heavily oriented on dates and calendar.
• Project management - Extensions to allow you put project plans, notes, documents in a single place. There will be support for several methodoliges, including agile (XP, Scrum, combinations), waterfall, etc. But main focus will be on making it possible to mix notes and other documents with tasks, issues, stories. There are often many ways to view project documentation: tasks and related notes, list of features and related tasks, etc. I believe some software (such as Trac) represent moves in the right direction, but they aren't quite getting everything right. Of course, they offer many options that won't be possible with Sider in the near future (online collaboration, source management integration, etc).

I also want to go back to Xelog. I like the idea behind it, but I don't like how heavyweight it ended up. I will need to fix that before moving on.

With the next post, I'll go back to discussing information management tools. I had some ideas and suggestions on how to improve my classification for them.