Adventures in Gadget Land

May 1st, 2008 by Jeffrey Harris

In 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.

Add a Quick Entry gadget to iGoogle

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.]

viagra
free viagra
buy viagra online
generic viagra
how does viagra work
cheap viagra
buy viagra
buy viagra online inurl
viagra 6 free samples
viagra online
viagra for women
viagra side effects
female viagra
natural viagra
online viagra
cheapest viagra prices
herbal viagra
alternative to viagra
buy generic viagra
purchase viagra online
free viagra without prescription
viagra attorneys
free viagra samples before buying
buy generic viagra cheap
viagra uk
generic viagra online
try viagra for free
generic viagra from india
fda approves viagra
free viagra sample
what is better viagra or levitra
discount generic viagra online
viagra cialis levitra
viagra dosage
viagra cheap
viagra on line
best price for viagra
free sample pack of viagra
viagra generic
viagra without prescription
discount viagra
gay viagra
mail order viagra
viagra inurl
generic viagra online paypal
generic viagra overnight
generic viagra online pharmacy
generic viagra uk
buy cheap viagra online uk
suppliers of viagra
how long does viagra last
viagra sex
generic viagra soft tabs
generic viagra 100mg
buy viagra onli
generic viagra online without prescription
viagra energy drink
cheapest uk supplier viagra
viagra cialis
generic viagra safe
viagra professional
viagra sales
viagra free trial pack
viagra lawyers
over the counter viagra
best price for generic viagra
viagra jokes
buying viagra
viagra samples
viagra sample
cialis
generic cialis
cheapest cialis
buy cialis online
buying generic cialis
cialis for order
what are the side effects of cialis
buy generic cialis
what is the generic name for cialis
cheap cialis
cialis online
buy cialis
cialis side effects
how long does cialis last
cialis forum
cialis lawyer ohio
cialis attorneys
cialis attorney columbus
cialis injury lawyer ohio
cialis injury attorney ohio
cialis injury lawyer columbus
prices cialis
cialis lawyers
viagra cialis levitra
cialis lawyer columbus
online generic cialis
daily cialis
cialis injury attorney columbus
cialis attorney ohio
cialis cost
cialis professional
cialis super active
how does cialis work
what does cialis look like
cialis drug
viagra cialis
cialis to buy new zealand
cialis without prescription
free cialis
cialis soft tabs
discount cialis
cialis generic
generic cialis from india
cheap cialis sale online
cialis daily
cialis reviews
cialis generico
how can i take cialis
cheap cialis si
cialis vs viagra
levitra
generic levitra
levitra attorneys
what is better viagra or levitra
viagra cialis levitra
levitra side effects
buy levitra
levitra online
levitra dangers
how does levitra work
levitra lawyers
what is the difference between levitra and viagra
levitra versus viagra
which works better viagra or levitra
buy levitra and overnight shipping
levitra vs viagra
canidan pharmacies levitra
how long does levitra last
viagra cialis levitra
levitra acheter
comprare levitra
levitra ohne rezept
levitra 20mg
levitra senza ricetta
cheapest generic levitra
levitra compra
cheap levitra
levitra overnight
levitra generika
levitra kaufen

20 Responses to “Adventures in Gadget Land”

  1. joe Says:

    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.

  2. travis Says:

    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 :-)

  3. aputsiaq Says:

    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

  4. Jeffrey Harris Says:

    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?

  5. aputsiaq Says:

    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”)

  6. joe Says:

    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.

  7. joe Says:

    btw. I tried fusedav. not very useful. Can’t even cat a file.

    http://0pointer.de/lennart/projects/fusedav/

  8. Jeffrey Harris Says:

    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.

  9. travis Says:

    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.

  10. joe Says:

    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.

  11. joe Says:

    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.

  12. BobH Says:

    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?

  13. Jeffrey Harris Says:

    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

  14. Jeffrey Harris Says:

    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.

  15. The Chandler Project Blog » Blog Archive » Get the Chandler iGoogle Gadget on Linux Desktop with Screenlets Says:

    [...] since Jeffrey put up the Chandler Quick Entry gadget on iGoogle, people have been asking for the same functionality on their desktop. Marcelo de Moraes Serpa [...]

  16. Aaron Says:

    Jeffrey I was wondering(although I am not yet familiar with googlegadget stuff) where the code for said gadget can be found? Although I don’t have a chandler hub account, I’m still interested in the utility of this gadget working with regular webDAV.

  17. Jeffrey Harris Says:

    Aaron:

    The source for the iGoogle widget is at http://svn.osafoundation.org/server/widgets/

    Note that it uses dojo for layout and packaging and the Cosmo ATOM APIs to talk to the server.

    To work with cross-site-scripting restrictions, the widget and the server need to be run on the same domain, we achieve this by proxying the Hub.

    You could likely do similar things with WebDAV.

  18. Erik Says:

    Chandler quick Entry is great, but how about adding the ability to sync with your own Cosmo server instead of only *The Hub*?

  19. Jeffrey Harris Says:

    Erik,

    Unfortunately because of cross-site-scripting restrictions, the iframe in an iGoogle gadget can only talk to one server.

    We could conceivably add the widget to the main server, instead of having them be separate packages, but it would take some doing.

  20. Guildenstern Says:

    I prefer Netvibes. I thought the netvibes UWA enables you building widgets which will work on netvibes as well on iGoogle

Leave a Reply