in need of filling.
Hotmail
Sometime in the last few months (possible when Windows Phone 7 was released), Microsoft made some changes to Hotmail that solve some long-demanded requests. With the Outlook Hotmail Connector, one can now use Hotmail much like an Exchange server. True, it's not quite the same, but it's almost adequate for home use. Use can access their calendar, contacts. and mail from Outlook on multiple devices as well as iOS, Android, and Windows Phone 7 using Exchange ActiveSync. Finally, Outlook is a viable product for the average consumer that posseses more than one computing device. (As is typical in this industry, however, task support has gone ignored; MilkSync and Remember the Mil do an adequate job remedying this situation, though it does cost $25 a year). Oh, and Hotmail can be setup just like Gmail to check mail from other accounts or send mail on their behalf.
Reinventing the Wheel
Though my goal with The Insight Project was to avoid reinventing the wheel, that's what I ended up doing. I wrote a desktop application from the ground up including data abstraction, GUI abstraction, plugin management, and in some ways, may own signals and slots system and my own smart pointer system. As a result, I spent most of my development time working on core internals rather than on functionality visible to the end user.
Revenue Model
Insight was never going to make money. Given the free products available, no consumer would pay for Insight and it would probably be decades before I could convince a business that it was a viable alternative the entrenched Microsoft or IBM solutions.
Long Live Insight
With all that said, the PIM realm still isn't what it should be. Hotmail now connects Outlook to Outlook and to mobile devices, but I can't find anything beyond POP3 for other clients (e.g. Evolution, the Linux world's answer to Outlook). I'm guessing Mac users are also limited to POP3 or Entourage for desktop access to Hotmail. One of the original goals of The Insight Project was cross platform sharing of PIM information. To that end, I'm pondering some new possibilities.
The Cloud Isn't Going Away
It's depressing and terrifying, but it's true: "Cloud Computing", whatever that is, is here to stay. Rather than fight it as I was attempting to do with Insight, if I begin new development, I'm going to take an approach similar to Diaspora, in which I will provide, for a fee, hosted access to whatever the product I develop may be or I'll allow people to download the server software and run their own server in-house.
A New Focus
While IMAP isn't quite as good as Exchange for email (specifically, IMAP allows one to flag messages but does not allow one to put due dates or reminders on them), it's good enough. Other PIM data, mostly task management, has been largely ignored. Going forward, I intend to focus primarily on task management for personal, social, and professional use (which would primarily include tasks and calendars) and add other features later. Moreover, this time around, instead of developing full- desktop software, I'll develop a server application with an open API and plugins for Outlook, Thunderbird, and Evolution.
A New Name
"Insight" was originally chosen because it's sort of the "opposite of outlook" (remember, I started dabbling in this before Outlook 2007, when Outlook was the defacto best of generally lame software). Since I started Insight, however, I discovered way too many email, PIM, and Outlook related programs by that name and a lot of my hostility toward the Outlook team has vanished. I don't know what the new name will be, but the project will definitely be separated from Insight.