It’s been a long road and finally CalDAV has reached publication at the IETF as an internet standard.

CalDAV is the first open calendaring protocol to be blessed by a standards body. CalDAV is already used in a variety of clients and servers including our own Chandler Desktop and Chandler Server. OSAF was one of the first adopters of CalDAV thanks to some great input from our previous server dev manager, now IETF application area director, Lisa Dusseault who helped create RFC 4791.

We should also thank Cyrus Daboo and Bernard Desruisseaux who have helped to drive not only this standard but other extensions to CalDAV which are in various phases of development and will provide longevity and broader adoption of CalDAV among a variety of users and institutions.

The OSAF team has been busily focusing on our “Preview” releases — functional products that are interesting enough for people to try out and give us meaningful feedback. (”Preview” will not be 1.0 — more like a usable public beta). Our original goal was to have these releases ready this month — we’ve adjusted our schedule to June. The countdown to Preview is tracked on our wiki.

Help us!

If you are adventurous and want to help out the project, we’d love to have people trying out the desktop application and the web application even before we get to Preview. Find bugs and help us make it better! Join the users list, download the latest checkpoint of the desktop application, or check out the web application.

Branding

Chandler was originally a code name for the desktop application. After careful consideration, we decided to use the name for the whole group of products (the desktop application, the online service and the server that runs the service). We’ve chosen a domain name (chandlerproject.org), and we’re working on a new logo. We’re also cleaning up our wiki and our websites as we near Preview. We discuss this work on the general mailing list.

Chandler Desktop

The desktop project hit a feature complete milestone on April 9. New features include recurrence and auto-triage of items in the dashboard, editing and updating items via email, Chandler IMAP folders, context menus, a new sharing format, conflict management, and data migration features. The team is working on performance now, and will spend many weeks after that fixing bugs.

Chandler Server (Cosmo)

“Chandler Server” is our new name for Cosmo. The 0.6 release of Chandler server was described in an earlier post. The server team is currently wrapping up the 0.6.1 release, which implements a new sharing format for data exchange with the desktop application. The team has also started on the 0.7 release, which will allow users to view and edit shared tasks and events in a table.

Chandler Hub (osaf.us)

“Chandler Hub” is our new name for the online service hosted by OSAF, running Chandler server. The service is currently running the 0.6 version of the server. We plan on moving to 0.6.1 in a few weeks, and upgrading to 0.7 in June. Once we’re ready to “Launch” Preview, we’ll use our new domain name (chandlerproject.org).

Chandler 0.7alpha5 has the ability to encrypt the email and sharing account passwords. To encrypt the account passwords, you need to go to File menu and select Protect Passwords… and set a master password. From then on, whenever Chandler needs to use an email or sharing account password, it will ask you for the master password in order to decrypt the protected account password(s). A word of warning though: if you forget the master password you will need to reset all passwords and set new values before email and sharing will work again. By default Chandler remembers the master password for 15 minutes, but you can change the time. The full specification for this feature is described in the Passwords spec.

We are very happy to have the following students working on projects this summer:

Tim Pokorny will be working with Bobby Rullo on “Comet Event Notification for Cosmo UI”

Phil Jones will be working with Jeffrey Harris on “Natural Language Processing with Chandler”

Vera Sheinman will be working with Jeffrey Harris on “Progress Reports Management”

More information on the projects is available here <http://code.google.com/soc/osaf/about.html>

Welcome!