Adventures in Gadget Land
May 1st, 2008 at 10:26 am (2 weeks ago) by Jeffrey Harris under Chandler Product News, How I Use ChandlerIn the early days of free e-mail accounts, I lived in a close-knit rural community. My close friends and I thought e-mail was the best thing ever invented, and we’d make all sorts of plans entirely by e-mail. What could be more simple and effective? It turned out almost anything.
While my closest friends all checked their e-mail hourly, many of my other friends had work that wasn’t sitting in front of a computer. Many of them got e-mail accounts only grudgingly, and checked them maybe weekly. I was constantly wasting time expecting people to have read my email proposals. Eventually, I learned that I had to kill trees if I wanted people to hear what I had to say.
Applications, even paradigm shifting applications, are only useful if you use them. Obvious though this may be, it’s critical in determining whether a tool is valuable in practice.
In my day to day use of Chandler, I often close the application down and forget to open it up again. When I want to go check whether I can schedule an event, or find some other specific piece of information, I go and load Chandler, no sweat. But when I have an idea or something I need to remember to do, I often just create an (electronic) sticky or emacs file or send an email to myself to track it.
This is a hassle! I love Chandler’s organization of my calendar, random thoughts, and tasks, especially the ability to set something to come back to my attention later. But I’m not getting us much advantage from this as I’d like, because I still have so many tasks not in Chandler. The truth is, I don’t need all that organizational power most of the time. Often, I’d just like to quickly jot down a task.
To make it easier for everyone in my position to add tasks to their Chandler collections, today we’re announcing Chandler Quick Entry for iGoogle. OK, maybe this doesn’t make anything easier for Nepalese babies. But hopefully it’ll be helpful for people who use Chandler Hub and iGoogle.
If your homepage is set to Google and you’ve never used iGoogle before, it’s worth a look. You can quickly add a few gadgets with blog feeds, news, or whatever else you’re into. And, now, you can create notes and quickly send them to Chandler Hub. If you use Chandler Desktop to sync your hub collections, your new note will appear in Chandler the next time it’s open and syncs.
Give it a try and let us know what you think!
[Note: at the moment, you can’t use Google’s Directory to add the gadget, the directory contains an old, non-functional version of the gadget. You need to click on the image above to successfully add.]
May 2nd, 2008 at 3:34 am
How about a text/console based quick entry tool? I’ve looked around for something like that but could not find anything. I’d be happy with a simple command line tool that can read a file and add it as a chandler “thing” (todo item usually). Something like..
ch-add -s “shopping list” todo.txt
I often don’t have a (useful) web browser with me.. but I always have an ssh client.
Or simple text editor and WebDav.. I tried this, but it did not work well.
I can access my collections with WebDav using DAVfs2 (on my Ubuntu laptop). I see everything as files.. which is cool. But if I PUT something creating a new file it’s not happy. I’ll upgrade my cosmo server and try again before reporting a bug.
If I use another DAV client and put new files in a collection they don’t seem to show up in the collections (using the web interface).
Does somebody have useful tips on how I can interact with cosmo/chandler using simple command line tools like a text editor? Mounting as a filesystem would be great.
May 2nd, 2008 at 10:41 am
Hi joe
I worked on something close to what you’re looking for, an emacs module for interacting with Hub, a few months back:
http://occident.us/2008/01/16/introducing-chandlerel/
It would be fairly trivial to put together a one-off kind of shell script that uses the command line utility curl for doing exactly what you’re looking for, based on either our feed service or CalDAV interface:
http://chandlerproject.org/Projects/CosmoFeedServiceSpec
What you’re asking for would also be useful to me, so I may go ahead and do something like this. I’ll update this thread with a link if/when I do
May 2nd, 2008 at 2:51 pm
Great news - I hope to switch entirely from iGoogle to the Chandler hub some day though.
I get the following message trying to use Chandler Entri:
Error parsing module spec:
Not a properly formatted file
missing xml header
May 2nd, 2008 at 3:20 pm
That’s really strange, I can’t reproduce your error. So the module installs, but won’t show up in iGoogle? If you you try it again and still have the problem, would you mind filing a bug at bugzilla.osafoundation.org?
May 2nd, 2008 at 3:35 pm
Hi again, I found out how to use it by simply using your “try it” link. There was a Google Chandler-gadget that now has been removed, and therefore no Chandler-gadgets… (quite ironically Google’s tab in iGoogle is named “Add stuff”, while my goal is to reduce “stuff”)
May 4th, 2008 at 3:05 am
Hi Travis
I tinkered with the AtomPub things. The only GUI I could find that claims to support Atom Publishing is Drivel.. but it does not want to connect to Cosmo.
http://www.dropline.net/drivel/
I should be connecting to my Cosmo server with path..
/chandler/atom/user/{username} right?
at least firefox shows me something if I hit that path.
The Atom stuff is kinda cool.. I see Wordpress also supports it, but it’s not really what I’m after.
My 1st prize is to be able to mount my collections as a linux filesystem, use a simple text editor (I use Jed) and just create a new text file to add an item to my Chandler collections.
I’m happy if a new plain text file is always seen as a todo (star) item or just notes. I can always sort/edit/tag them later. I’ll still add calendar items with the Chandler GUI.
A quick howto on how to get DAVfs working in Ubuntu/Debian:
sudo apt-get install davfs2
edit /etc/davfs2/davfs2.conf to disable locking:
use_locks 0
sudo mount -t davfs http://myserver.tld:8080/chandler/dav/user@myserver.tld/ /mnt/chandler/
I see my collections as directories. Very nice.. but I can’t change anything. It changes locally, but the server gives me a 4xx and 5xx errors.
I can send Wireshark TCP session dumps if it would help.
ps. would be nice if Cosmo supported DAV locking I guess.
May 4th, 2008 at 3:29 am
btw. I tried fusedav. not very useful. Can’t even cat a file.
http://0pointer.de/lennart/projects/fusedav/
May 5th, 2008 at 9:44 am
Joe, the reason you’re having trouble treating Cosmo as a WebDAV server is because it’s actually a CalDAV server. CalDAV has many similarities to WebDAV but it’s more restrictive in what files can be stored.
Particularly, CalDAV collections must contain items of content type text/calendar, and those items must be valid iCalendar.
May 5th, 2008 at 10:09 am
Hi Joe
On the Atompub front, I’m sorry to say it’s unlikely standard Atompub tools will work as expected at the moment, as our feed service API doesn’t yet handle simple entry content bodies in a sane way. There’s actually a bug for this here:
https://bugzilla.osafoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11407
When this bug gets fixed I would expect most standard Atompub tools would need to be pointed at the user service URL you mention, and should be able to read/write notes on any collections you own.
May 6th, 2008 at 1:24 am
Hi Jeffrey
Ok, makes sense.
If I mount Cosmo as a WebDAV server and I copy one valid file from one collection to the other.. surely it should work? Content type and body must be valid… but, it does not work.
I’d be happy if I could mount it as WebDAV and follow the rules of CalDAV.
May 6th, 2008 at 1:24 am
Hi Jeffrey
Ok, makes sense.
If I mount Cosmo as a WebDAV server and I copy one valid file from one collection to the other.. surely it should work? Content type and body must be valid… but, it does not work.
I’d be happy if I could mount it as WebDAV and follow the rules of CalDAV.
May 6th, 2008 at 6:50 am
iGoogle is one of those apps not ready for prime time. It takes forever to load and not many of the tools really work well. I had high hopes for it but have given up. I tried to load the Chandler mini-app and got the same error message as the folks above. After several tries I get it to load within iGoogle but entering a note doesn’t seem to work. What does the Send To drop down do? Why do I have to log into CP when I’m already logged into Google?
May 6th, 2008 at 11:07 am
To folks having trouble with the widget, are you using the links on this blog entry?
As aputsiaq noted in his comment, Google’s directory includes a very old experimental gadget that doesn’t work, unfortunately they don’t expose a way to remove it. On top of that, they won’t add the up-to-date version until it’s been around long enough.
So, please use this link:
http://fusion.google.com/ig/add?synd=open&source=ggyp&moduleurl=http://widgets.osaf.us/google_entri.xml
to add the real widget.
BobH
May 6th, 2008 at 11:19 am
BobH, sorry you’ve found iGoogle frustrating. What browser are you using? With Firefox and Safari I find iGoogle pretty responsive, but YMMV.
You need to log in once to Chandler Hub because this gadget is just an interface to send data to Chandler Hub, we’re not storing your notes on Google. You should only need to log in once, though.
The Send To drop down selects which Chandler collection your notes will go to, many people have different collections for different contexts.