CHI 2004 Notes: Haystack

Haystack is project of the MIT Laboratory for Computer Sciences, supported by the IBM Watson Research Center in Cambridge/Massachusetts. Haystack claims to be a “universal information client”. The application allows for a unified access to all kinds of data like e-mail, calendaring, contacts, tasks, bookmarks, RSS feeds etc. and can be extended in order to support arbitrary (structured) data sources.

The current test release (available for Windows, MacOS X, Linux) gives an insight in the direction Haystack is taking. But, without instructions you might get lost pretty soon. For my impression, the interface has to become a lot more concrete when dealing with certain object types and tasks.(»New E-Mail« instead of »Add New Item«).