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The Dashboard collection in Chandler has some interesting properties (not all of which, intentional that have proven fertile ground for experimentation by some of our more adventurous users.

Going into Preview, we had a number of theories about what user needs the Dashboard would fulfill. Some of our assumptions have played out, others haven’t. Here is a recap:

1. We thought it was important for users to get a cross-collection view of all their data where the could process items regardless of what collections (groupings, contexts, categories) they had been assigned to. It’s also a handy way to see what’s new across all of your collections without having to click on individual collections one-by-one.

2. On the other hand, given the number of “other people’s collections” an user might subscribe to, we wanted to make sure that people had a way of quarantining FYI subscriptions from the personal collections in their Dashboard. As a result, we implemented a “Keep out of Dashboard” feature that allowed you to quarantine items on a per-collection basis so that they weren’t automatically picked up by the Dashboard.

There are still some behavioral idiosyncracies to be worked out, but it’s been interesting to see how users have made creative use of these 2 relatively simple ways to define the Dashboard view.

1. Some people use the Dashboard get a view across of “their personal stuff” versus “other people’s stuff”. (I use it this way, although I don’t spend very much time in the Dashboard collection.)

2. Some use the Dashboard purely as a place to collect new notes, an “intake” area so-to-speak. Once the note has been “processed” and added to the appropriate collections, it is removed from the Dashboard. In order to make this work, all of your collections must be initially kept out of the Dashboard. (This is analogous to the GTD Collection phase.)

3. Some use the Dashboard as a way of hand-picking a sub-set of NOW items to focus on “Today”. (I imagine these would be users who find themselves regularly ending up with pretty large NOW sections in each collection.) Again, in order to make this work, all of your collections must be initially kept out of the Dashboard.

How are you using the Dashboard?

For a couple of months now, Chandler Hub has supported the ability to sync all of your Chandler data (not just events) onto other iCalendar or CalDAV to applications and tasks.

Chandler notes (starred or plain) should now show up in other iCalendar or CalDAV calendar applications (e.g. Apple iCal, and Lightning) as Tasks (VTODOS).

Here are instructions on how to subscribe to Chandler collections from other calendar applications. (Unfortunately, some Chandler-specific will be lost. e.g. NOW and LATER triage status will both be interpreted as “Not-Done”. Anytime events will look the same as All-day events.)

I also demo this in the second half of the new 3-Minute Feature Tour. Also available (lo-res) on YouTube.

Has anyone made use of this feature yet?

Keith recently wrote into the users list about how he uses Microsoft OneNote with Chandler and how he’d love it if the new clickable URLs feature worked for OneNote links as well. (Emphasis, mine.)

As I posted in my user story, I am hopelessly disorganised. I have a theory that if I buy enough plastic boxes, I’ll attain the miraculous state of ‘in control’. Bits of paper containing ‘notes to self’ used to be found months after they’d been written, by which time it was too late to do anything with them.

OneNote has become my one piece of paper. On my tablet PC, I can hand write notes as I’m on the phone to customers. I can use it creatively for something like mind mapping - free-form, different colours, engage both sides of the brain. I can print web pages to it, embed photos and web clippings, possible solutions to problems - anything relating to anything, and all shared between whichever machines I’m using at the time.

Chandler provides diary and task management capabilities, shared between myself and my wife. I tend to use OneNote for the ‘capture’ phase and for organising my thoughts, then Chandler manages the next actions, appointments, and reminders.

Typically, I create a list of actions in OneNote, hit a hot key in AutoHotKey and the selected action will be copied to clipboard and pasted to a new task in Chandler.

One feature of OneNote is a right-click “copy this page’s URL to clipboard” and I’m envisaging modifying my script to create a task in Chandler and then paste the URL of the OneNote page into Chandler’s notes field, providing a one-click link back to the original OneNote page. Also, I’m looking at an AutoHotKey script to copy a task in OneNote and paste it into Chandler’s search box, so that I’ve got a kludgey but fairly seamless each way link between items.

So nothing too complicated, just a quick means of linking items in each app to each other.

Note To make it so that Chandler recognizes OneNote URLs, you must first apply this patch. However, if enough OneNote users pipe up with feedback that this would be very useful, we will up the priority on making it so OneNote URLs work by default.

Note: Not real data.

We have released a special edition “Test Version” of Chandler Desktop in order to try out patches submitted by Nick Parlante for 2 oft-requested features:

1. Clickable links in the item notes field
2. Support more custom recurrence rules.

So please help us test by trying out these 2 new features! As usual, send feedback and report problems to The Chandler-Users mailing list.

The build is available here, or, if you’re running 0.7.7 or later, via the Tools >> Check for Test Updates menu item.

Note for Mac and Linux: At this time, there is minimal support for visual feedback that links are clickable on Mac and Linux. Meaning, links will not be blue or underlined. However, if you mouse over a valid URL, your cursor should switch to the hand, and clicks should be handled correctly.

A few months ago, as part of a general effort to pare down the Chandler Desktop interface, we removed the notion of marking Notes as “Tasks”.

At the same time, we added a more “generic” notion of “Starring Notes and Events”.

Why did we make this change?
A common piece of feedback we received was: “I don’t understand the point of marking some of my Notes as Tasks. Isn’t everything I put into Chandler some sort of to-do?”

Since then, there has much discussion on the Chandler Users-List about this decision. As it turned out, there were users who did find the Task label useful, used it heavily and were disappointed to see it go.

I wrote a summary a couple of weeks ago that includes a rough outline of next steps for addressing this issue:

Summary

1. We’ve heard from a number of users on the list that the Task Stamp is sorely missed and that the Star stamp does not satisfy the same user need. (It’s always nice to hear that a feature was liked and used!)

2. My next design project is to revive and update a proposal for extending the range of Item Kinds in Chandler to re-instate Tasks and add a Reference Kind, and an extremely basic notion of Contacts. This will be a good opportunity for us to re-examine the Task Stamp (how can it be improved?!**) as well as discuss simple things we can do to make basic, yet useful Reference and Contacts Kinds. (See Chandler as a Platform for previous design proposals.)

3. We have also discussed making a “Task” parcel available in the short-term as a temporary stop-gap measure while we sort out a more coherent story for customizing and extending Item Kinds.

4. Last but not least, we remain focused on users who will be heavy users of Chandler and are trying our best to balance competing user needs.

** One of my theories about why the Task Stamp felt superfluous to some people is that it simply didn’t “do” enough to merit use. The same could be said for why in PIMs, features like Flagging and Starring are more widely used than To-do Lists.

Peter Allen blogged recently about his experiences using Chandler:

I started using the Chandler Project a while back and I really liked it. It gives you tickler alarms for things you need to do plus a space for notes. So instead of a calendar where once the date is past, the event is gone, it’s a recurring reminder. It’s like a Jack Russel Terrrier, always jumping around and wanting attention. And every little thing can get recorded in its entries so when the reminder goes off, the appropriate info is at your fingertips.

Depending on who you talk to, a piece of software that reminds you of a Jack Russell Terrier could either be very good, or very bad That aside, Peter’s post is a pretty succinct articulation of what’s unique about Reminders and Calendar Dates in Chandler. Alerts that pop up once work well for reminding you to do “2-minute” tasks like “Take your pills” or “Go to meeting”.

But reminders to start working on persistent, long-term projects like “Work on proposal for…” or “Come up with questions for…” fail miserably if they simply appear and disappear. Instead, setting “reminder dates” needs to work hand-in-hand with a way to manage your focus over long stretches of time. Chandler accomplishes this by not only providing “short-term” alerts in the form of pop-up dialogs, but by also using reminder and event dates to automatically re-focus notes and events into your list of “NOW” items. By contrast, a solution that worked more like a Jack Russell Terrier might be one that keeps popping up reminder dialogs every 5-10 minutes until you finish the task, but perhaps I betray my personal feelings about Jack Russells.

The following screenshot was taken from the Chandler Product Tour:

Unfortunately, Peter ran into performance issues:

Alas, the software is still too slow for me.

But, he did add the caveat:

If you have a fast machine, it’s worth checking out.

We recognize that poor performance is a deal-breaker for many people who have tried to use Chandler and we’re addressing it as part of a major re-architecture project. Still, it’s nice to see that some of these “harder to quantify” features of Chandler are proving to be of use!

The Chandler Project is pleased to announce the 0.14.2 release of Chandler Server (Cosmo)!

Chandler Server is a server and Ajax web UI for managing and sharing calendars, events, and tasks. It implements open data standards including CalDAV, WebDAV, Atom, and Atompub.

This is a bugfix release to update the visual treatment on the login page and add a new widget specific Javascript build.

Chandler Server 0.14.2 is available for download as a ready-to-run bundle at:

http://chandlerproject.org/serverdownload

and the source code is available from subversion at:

http://svn.osafoundation.org/server/cosmo/tags/rel_0.14.2

Send us feedback at the open mailing list (no subscription required):

chandler-users@osafoundation.org

We look forward to hearing from you!

While Chandler was originally conceived as a general purpose personal information management tool, we realized early on that sharing and collaboration, particularly small-group collaboration needed to be integral to any effective personal information manager.

It’s an exciting time to be in this area of software development. Software companies are finally turning their attention to small organizations, businesses and households; groups that are less structured than traditional corporate environments.

Chandler falls into this new category of personal and collaboration tools for small, loosely structured workgroups. There are 2 significant ways in which Chandler departs from enterprise-scale collaboration tools:

One. Traditionally, many collaboration tools have been structured around “clients” and projects, which were presumed to have start and end dates and concrete deliverables, that once delivered meant the project was complete. Delivering for each client was assumed to be a relatively “straightforward, process-oriented” affair that could be mapped out in “workflows” that remained constant from one project to the next.

By contrast, Chandler assumes that new projects (or tasks) will continuously emerge from existing projects. Old projects change or become irrelevant before they’re even begun. As a result, “work” becomes a never-ending, ever-changing procession directed towards a higher-level goal. To be sure, deadlines and milestones exist along the way. But they are markers in a continuous progression as opposed to tidy endings to bounded projects.

In short, Chandler is designed for groups that are constantly re-inventing what it is they do and how they do it.

As a result, building and maintaining project and workflow structures for managing and organizing such a constantly changing morass of tasks, dates and unresolved issues just doesn’t seem worth it.

Instead, Chandler is intended for users who are actively looking for something that lets you stay “organized” at their own pace. They specifically don’t want to feel like they’re being pressured to set deadlines they’re not ready to set. They don’t want to be harassed about tasks you entered but no longer need to do. In other words, Chandler users want a “Don’t call me, I’ll call you.” kind of tool.

Two. Traditionally, collaboration tools have focused on coordinating hand-off of information and shared resources (documents, media, etc) so that each member of the team has access to what they need in order to focus on their work.

By contrast, Chandler assumes that ownership of responsibilities is shared and passed from one member of the team to another with relative fluidity.

As a result, Chandler sharing isn’t modeled as a fileshare that gives everyone access to everyone else’s work. Instead, Chandler collaboration assumes that people need help working on the same thing together.

Sharing in Chandler is less about “watching” other people’s task lists and calendars and more about sharing a group collection and calendar where individual tasks are passed around or simply worked on in parallel by multiple people.

This doesn’t mean that “personal” collections can’t and shouldn’t be shared with others. It’s more a matter of “What is Chandler’s special sauce?” when it comes to collaboration.

This fluidy in collaboration also explains why Chandler is first and foremost a personal tool with built-in collaboration as opposed to straight-on groupware.

Our belief is that the line between “my work” and “your work” and “our work” is now sufficiently blurred such that tools that draw a hard line between personal and group task management simply erect unecessary hindrances that break common workflows.

Note: This is yet another way in which Chandler aspires to mimic email. People see email first and foremost as a personal tool. But fundamentally, email is about communicating and working with others. Nevertheless, the collaboration aspect of email is framed as an extension of the personal.)

As promised, here is a specific scenario illustrating how Chandler can help to reduce and simplify the information in your life.

Use Case: Setting up and Following-thru on a Meeting.

Edit, Evolve, Send and Re-Send the same item of information as your task to schedule a meeting turns into an invitation turns into a scheduled meeting on your calendar turns into an agenda list turns into meeting notes.

A simple meeting can often generate a dozen or more separate bits of information for everyone involved; bits of information that each person then needs to manage independently.

• You create a task item to schedule a meeting;
• Send out a separate email message to invite others to the meeting;
• Follow-up with a whole thread to work out the meeting agenda;
• And add the meeting to your calendar.

• As the meeting shifts around and the agenda changes (all information that arrives via more email messages), you update the event on your calendar.

• During the meeting, you write up notes and send them out in yet another email; which in turn
• Prompts responses as others amend your meeting notes in follow-up emails

When you go back to look for the definitive record of what was discussed and decided at that meeting, where do you start? There are so many bits to collate and reconcile into a “single source of truth”.

By contrast, in Chandler you have 1 item that you edit and amend over time with changes and new information.

Your task to schedule a meeting can be sent out as an invitation email and then put on your calendar once everyone has agreed to a suitable time. In parallel, you can pull together a meeting agenda on that same meeting event item. During the meeting, you can take meetings notes, again in the same meeting event item. All the while, you can send and resend the same task/event item to notify people who aren’t sharing through Chandler.

1. Collecting Agenda Items for a Meeting in a “Task List” View

2. Reviewing Meeting Notes from the Calendar

3. Sending an Update to the Event with Notes from the Meeting

More importantly, all of this use and re-use is plausible because you can access the same information item from different contexts (the calendar and the list view, multiple collections) and there is built-in support for “losing” and “finding” information. Otherwise, recycling and evolving notes and events would quickly turn into an onerous workflow you would not bother with.

In Chandler:

• Meetings on your calendar can be managed like tasks in a list view; and vice versa,
• Tasks can be tracked from the list view *and* put on the calendar to mark important deadlines and milestone dates;

• The LATER “Triage Status” allows you to “disappear” stuff you can’t deal with right now without losing it forever;
• Tickler alarms and event dates automatically re-focus your attention on things you need to follow-up on

This Recycling Workflow works for maintaining lists (shopping lists, lists of questions, thank you notes, etc) and working on drafts as well. Really, it applies to anything that evolves and changes over time.

Yesterday I lamented that I wasn’t seeing any discussion about how email overload is fundamentally a collaboration problem (as opposed to a personal information management issue).

Then of course, I immediately ran into this one.

So, is it true? Will a new generation of collaboration tools help us wean ourselves off email? (The same way IM and social networking have already weaned us off email for social interactions.)

We hope so.

Chandler is most useful when used as an alternative for all the important stuff you used to do with email.

This should be true if you’re just using Chandler for yourself. This is doubly true if you’re sharing with others because at its best, Chandler opens up an alternative, more ergonomic channel for collaboration that results in fewer bits of information to keep track of and allows the group to leverage individual efforts to manage and organize information.

However, any collaboration medium that attempts to supplant email needs to retain what’s great about email while avoiding the pitfalls that have us all reeling from overflowing inboxes.

Here are some lists of email characteristics we want to emulate and avoid in Chandler.

What we want to keep: Email doesn’t get in the way of your ideas!

1. Every new message is a blank slate. Unlike other collaboration mediums (CMSes, Wikis, Project Managers, Shared Documents) composing new email doesn’t require you to first figure out how this “new thing” fits in with everything that’s come before.
2. Email lets you tackle issues in bite-sized pieces.
   

   Bite-sized means it’s easier to get started on tackling hard problems.

   Bite-sized also means you can manage email like a task list (as many people do). This in turn helps you multi-task. You can start, develop, fork and resolve dozens of threads at the same time. You keep track of it all by flagging/filing individual messages. With email, big, intractable problems are conveniently broken down into bite-sized next actions.

3. Email lets you tackle issues from multiple angles. You can formulate and reformulate what you’re thinking in a dozen different ways, addressed to a dozen different groups of people. Again, unlike other collaboration mediums, there’s no pre-existing structure to get in the way of what you need to do. Each new message/thread exists as it’s own, independent topic of discussion.
4. Email is free-form. Email messages are all about the wide-open field of unstructured data we call the message body. It allows you to focus on what you need to communicate! Whom you need to communicate with, is the only unavoidable decision you need to make. However, with the advent of aliases (everyone@wholeoffice), even that decision is avoidable.

1. Email is universal. Not everyone is on your Exchange server. Not everyone has access to your company’s intranet. But everyone (for all intensive purposes) is on email these days. Email is the one communication medium where you’re guaranteed to get through (except when overzealous SPAM filters get in the way). Whether someone will actually absorb your communication is a separate issue.
2. Email is asynchronous. You can continue to make progress on other work as you wait for responses. This means you can work independently of your colleagues without losing touch.
3. Email keeps you up-to-date on what’s new. Every “new” piece of information is pushed to you as a new message. You never have to remember to “check-in” to find out what’s going on. You also never have to go hunting through an edited document wondering, What’s changed? Did something change?
4. Email encourages discussion. Email is linear. Each person gets their say. (However, while talking on top of one another is no longer a problem, no tool can prevent people from talking past each other.)

What we want to avoid and improve on: Email begets more email!
The very qualities that make email the defining tool of the information workplace are also its Achilles heel. Email is too easy to send. Each email in turn spawns more email to the point where you can no longer see the forest for the trees and you need to create more bits of information to keep track of the bits you’re losing in email.

1. There’s no way to “silently” make information available on an “as-needed” basis. To get information out, you have to send the email, thereby actively pinging every recipient with a message, regardless of whether you need their active attention. Ergo, we all get a lot of FYI mail, which in turn, dilutes the pool of mail that actually requires a response.
2. You can’t edit email. Once you’ve sent it, it’s done. If you forgot something, if someone else wants to add something to your list, if there’s been a change in plans, you’ll have to send a separate email. Ergo, we all get a lot of “update” emails.
3. When a mail goes out to 1 or 200 people, every recipient has to do the work of processing that email. Oftentimes, we process it in exactly the same way: Received a notice to hand in your benefit forms? Add it to the calendar. Put it in your “HR” folder. Yet, there’s no good way to distribute that work across the group. Ergo, we all spend a lot of time managing email.
4. There’s no way to add structure to email. The unstructured, blank slate that email offers when you’re initially composing the message is great for unblocking the free-flow of information. However, once you do have enough of a clue to add a bit more structure, you can’t. Ergo, email results in the creation of even more bits of information to manage as each email creates new calendar events and task items.
5. There’s no source of truth. Decisions are amended and reversed over multiple, forking threads. People are added and removed from conversations. Uncovering “the truth” in email turns out to be subjective and hard-won.

There are a dozen different ways in which Chandler strives to meet the ideal described above. We’ve already begun to see success stories of users moving their work from email into Chandler and we’re using them to help us become a better alternative to email!

In refining our product message, one question we want to answer well is: What kind of information does Chandler help you manage?

The short answer: Chandler helps you manage all the notes you write to yourself.

The long answer: Chandler helps you Collect, Share and Follow-through all the “stuff” you:

• Email yourself,
• Scribble on napkins,
• Stick in random text files and electronic sticky notes, and
• Put down in paper notebooks.

“Stuff” includes anything from ideas you need to develop and questions you need to follow-up on to things you forgot to do, things you can’t forget to do, meetings, appointments and the odd flash of revelatory inspiration.

In short, your day-to-day life is overflowing with ideas, thoughts and questions you need to Develop, Follow-up on and Get back to and you don’t have a good way to manage it all.

Traditional task managers are too rigid. But you need something more structured than your paper notebook.

Also, almost everything you do involves other people and you find that just managing the communications about what you’re doing as a group is a second job in an of itself.

Some more specific examples:

1. You come out of a meeting with a dozen new “things” to “research” and “think about”. You’ve scribbled them into your notebook. But now you don’t have a good way to develop and track those things as you make progress on them: Follow up with X about Y. Where do you keep track of what X tells you about Y while you figure out what it is you need to do with Y?

2. Pulling a meeting agenda together always generates an algae bloom of email. Once everyone’s input has been gathered and re-gathered over email, you’re the one that has to do the work of collating everybody’s responses.

3. You keep making the same lists all the time and every time, you forget something that you would’ve remembered if you had seen the last list you’d made. But you don’t have a good way to manage all these lists! e.g. Travel packing lists, grocery list, present ideas, thank you notes.

4. When working on drafts with others: Write-ups, status reports, proposals etc., you’re always torn between just sending out what you’ve got so far or wait a little longer. In the meantime, everyone else is unaware of the work you’ve done and working blind.

5. You tried sharing a calendar with others, but you’re the only one who ever looks at it! Whenever you add or change something, you end up having to send email out to get people’s attention anyway. The same thing happens when you try to collaborate on tasks or brainstorming ideas with a wiki. In the end, you always go back to using email.

Why is “What kind of information does Chandler help you manage?” a tricky question to answer?

In a previous post, I talked about using the phrase “personal information manager” to describe Chandler. Taken literally, yes, Chandler is a variant of personal information manager. But, using the PIM label confuses people in the software industry because it’s associated with specific software products that Chandler does not resemble.

The general population doesn’t have such specific product associations, so they might take PIM at face-value. However, the phrase “personal information” is now understood in the vernacular as shorthand for “information about me” (e.g. name, address, social security number, bank accounts, health records, etc.) This is especially true amongst computer-literate, white-collar workers, aka, our target audience.

In case there was any confusion, Chandler is not optimized to manage “information about me”.

Going forward, our task is to re-craft our product message with this in mind, both so we attract the users Chandler was designed for and we set expectations for new users trying out Chandler for the first time.

The Chandler Project is pleased to announce the 0.7.3 release of Chandler Desktop!

Download link, information on mailing lists, and how to get the sources available from the homepage.

The 0.7.3 release is the third in a series of quick, time-based releases since Chandler Preview 0.7.0 intended to respond to the feedback we received from 0.7.0 and continue to receive from these quick releases.

0.7.3 fixes over 50 bugs and includes some major improvements:

• Month View:Yes! Month View! This has been pretty much at the very top of everyone’s wish list so we decided to bite the bullet and just did it. Month View can be reached by simply clicking the month name in the top area of the calendar. Switch back to week view simply clicking on the week number on the left side. This fixes bugs:
  • Bug #5361: 30-day view? Variable multi-day view.
• Bundled Localizations: Chandler now comes bundled with localizations in French, Swedish and Finnish. If you’d like to join the localization effort in your own native language, we are looking for volunteers. This is a great way to get familiarized with Chandler ideas and its community. We fixed the following bugs along the way:
  • Bug #11197 Normalize dialog title capitalization
  • Bug #11199 Bogus message in MasterPassword
  • Bug #11201 Incorrect strings in GetPasswordDialog
  • Bug #11260 Export dialog text says ‘Exported’ not Dumped
  • Bug #11333 Reword Unpublish Confirmation dialog
  • Bug #11405 Need different strings for no encryption and no alarm (currently ‘None’)
  • Bug #11419 Fixed running with localed using ‘,’ instead of ‘.’ for decimal point (was : invalid literal for float() error when reloading a .chex)
  • Bug #11470 File > Sync manager… has mnemonic
  • Bug #11490 Reminders dialog missing mnemonics, default button
• Share Management: There’s a new feature under the File menu called Sync Manager. This allows users to view and choose which of the published collections on their Chandler Server need to be synced with the Chandler Desktop. Additionally, this dialog shows up automatically in some situation (like restoring settings). This helps the user to avoid “forgetting” collections on the server.
  • Bug #10971 Auto-restore published shares
  • Bug #11334 Sync Menu items
• Support and build for Mac OS X Leopard, Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon and Use System Libraries: Modern OSes are now catching up with Chandler’s use of cutting edge releases of Python. So the good news is that, for those systems, we don’t have to bundle all these, resulting in much smaller downloads. We now provide special downloads for those Systems.
  • Bug #11088 Use system python on Mac (Leopard), Ubuntu Feisty and forward
• Automate Upgrade Process: User now have the option to let Chandler export a .chex on quit. This is convenient for new users (small data base) with fast machines. For old timers with thousands of items, there’s an option to bypass this (don’t forget to export though _before_ upgrading to a new version of Chandler):
  • Bug #11139 Automate upgrade process

For a more complete list of bug fixes and known issues, please visit our Release Notes.

Thanks for your interest in Chandler Desktop!

The Chandler Project is pleased to announce the 0.7.2 release of Chandler Desktop!

Download links, information on mailing lists, and how to get the sources are available from the homepage.

The 0.7.2 release is the second in a series of quick, time-based releases since Chandler Preview 0.7.0.1 intended to respond to the feedback we received from 0.7.0.1 and continue to receive from these quick releases.

0.7.2 fixes over 80 bugs and includes some major improvements:

• Dashboard: Following up on users logged bugs and remarks, we improved the Dashboard display of the Who column and made it work more in sync with the other columns. We also changed how the triage status cycles. This fixes bugs:
  • Bug #10924 Chandler leaves the Who column blank when the user stamps an item but doesn’t address it
  • Bug #10925 Chandler displays ‘to’ if a message is neither fromMe nor toMe
  • Bug #10926 The order of Triage Status has been changed to NOW, LATER, DONE
  • Bug #10927 The ‘Edited/Updated by’ in the Who column is displayed only for unread messages
• Support for Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon: We’re now using wxPython 2.8.6.0 which fixes crashes reported by several users of Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon. This fixes Bug #10906.
• New version of PyLucene: Chandler’s PyLucene is not using gcj anymore, but rather our own home brew jcc. This fixes Bug #10803 among others.
• Auto fill for common email providers: Account settings now fill automatically for the most common email providers. Just type your email address and if the provider is recognized, most of the settings will be filled out automatically.
• Chandler-on-a-stick, a.k.a. “Portable Chandler”: Though not built automatically and available for download, it is now possible to build a relocatable distribution of Chandler that can be stored on, and run from a removable device such as a USB memory stick or an iPod.
• Getting ready for l10n (localization): Chandler Desktop 0.7.2 is not completely ready for localizers yet (still a handful of bugs to fix; this will happen in 0.7.3) but we solved a significant set of issues that will make the localization process much easier:
  • Bug #3740 Tests are now run on a Tinderbox using a non-ascii locale / charset for path
  • Bug #5658 Localized UI meta data stored in the Repository needs to be refreshable without altering User Data : There’s now a new language picker in the File menu making it easier to change language and test localization without having to throw the whole repository or use magic command line options
  • Bug #10132 Triage NOW, LATER, DONE images un-localizable : now those bitmaps are computed within Chandler using provided localized text. No more bitmaps to localize!
  • Bug #10136 Improving Chandler gettext tools
  • Bug #10139 Add context comments to Chandler Code. Extra L10N comments that display in po editors (like poedit) have been incorporated in the code to give context to localizers.
  • Bug #10140 Clean up the Python code to produce a more useable Chandler.pot : Chandler 0.7.2 does not use the English language translation file to correct inconsistency in the Python code so localization files can now be tested.
  • Bug #10957 Send button clips off screen when button label verbiage expanded
  • Bug #11061 Incorrect detection of country code on Mac OS X
  • Bug #11066 Can’t create events with international date formats
  • Bug #11073 The Application.restart method needs to shutdown all Chandler services
  • Bug #11106 Splash Screen needs to handle text expansion
  • Bug #11107 File Menu Item New ->New revisisted
  • Bug #11117 Rework the conflict resolution strings to be clearer to localizers
  • Bug #11135 Improve i18n of recurrence strings in emails
  • Bug #11162 Fix some missing mnemonics

For a more complete list of bug fixes and known issues, please visit our Release Notes.

Thanks for your interest in Chandler Desktop!

For Preview, we’ve made a huge effort in updating and expanding Chandler Project documentation.

Visit our new Chandler Project website.

From here, you can Download Chandler Desktop, Sign up for a Chandler Hub account as well as find our newly updated Vision Document and Feature List, complete with screenshots and informational demos of both Chandler Desktop and Chandler Hub in action.

For a blow-by-blow list of what’s new and what’s changed since the 0.6 release, see Preview Release Notes.

There is now a consolidated FAQ that covers topics ranging from ‘What license is Chandler under?‘ to ‘Can I use Chandler for Email?‘ and developer questions.

We are also working on a Get Started Guide for step by step instructions on everything from setting up accounts and sharing to a quick overview of Chandler’s core information management workflows. We expect the guide to be a ‘living document’ that will be continually improved to help new users ramp up. Check it out and give us feedback!

If you run into problems using Chandler, take a look at Known Issues and Troubleshooting.

If you think you’re problem is new, subscribe to the Chandler-Users mailing list and send us an email. If you’re pretty sure you know what’s going on, following the directions on the Report a Bug page and log a bug.

Here is an overview of how you can Get Involved, including an up-to-date list of Starter Projects.

Last but not least, if you’re looking to learn more about Chandler as a project, dig through our newly re-organized Project Wiki where you will find an overview of the Desktop, Server and Hub Service, detailed design and developer documentation as well as day-to-day planning, bug-tracking and notes.