One scenario Chandler can be useful for is pulling together meeting agendas and maintaining a log of meeting notes.

Meetings are the perfect example of how calendaring and task management are inextricably intertwined. It is a problem area that highlights Chandler’s ability to cross boundaries and integrate information by letting you manage events from a task list and vice versa, manage tasks with a calendar.

Many organizations rely heavily on email for coordinating meetings: to schedule them, collect ideas for the agenda and disseminate meetings notes.

Emails fly back and forth…which means the ‘final list’ of agenda items always needed to be manually collated by somebody. This sometimes involves sifting through a dozen or so emails.

After the meeting is over, notes need to be written up and sent out. Sometimes a wiki is used to create an accessible log of meeting minutes.

Anyone wanting to read those notes needs to either sift through email or try find the notes by navigating the wiki.

By contrast, in Chandler, the same thing can be done with a single event item that:

• Represents the meeting on the calendar;
• Can be managed as a task, both when preparing for the meeting and follow-up with meeting notes;
• Functions as a “shared workspace” for brainstorming agenda items and logging notes.

For example, if you have a daily check-in meeting on the calendar. Anyone can add agenda items from the calendar or the Triage List. Each person can see the agenda items others have already added. You have what amounts to a shared, asynchronous “whiteboard” where you can brainstorm without having to be in the same room.

As the agenda begins to take shape, the meeting event can be sent from Chandler as an email invitation.

When it’s time for the meeting to start, the event drops into the top of the NOW section with the agenda right in the notes field.

During the meeting, notes can be taken right in the meeting event, which can then be re-sent via email, now updated with notes from the meeting.

Others wanting to get caught up on the daily check-ins can simply browse the calendar from Chandler Desktop or Chandler Hub on the web.

You start out with a simple email. Perhaps notes from a meeting…

Hi!

Here are some of the issues we noted during out meeting.

1. …
2. …
3. …
4. …

It occurred to me that I actually have a number of questions about #2. Off the top of my head, some of them are:

• …
• …
• …

I’m sure I’ll think of more.

We also talked about looking into these options as possible ways to resolve ….

• …
• …
• …
• …

Unfortunately, I don’t know the status of …, does anybody else know? Should we look into this more?

Here are some other next actions that came out of the meeting:

• …
• …
• …
• …

Am I missing anything?

This 1 email might generate 15 separate threads of conversations.

People respond with:

• More open issues
• Questions about the open issues
• Questions about #2
• Answers to your question re: the status of …
• More next actions
• Status updates on next actions they’ve already started
• Stuff you forgot

You make progress as a group. But all of your work is buried in 1, 2, 3, 10 threads of emails.

Each message opens up more open issues to track, more questions to answer, more next actions to do.

You end up with dozens to hundreds of flagged email you need to react to in some way. But before you have a chance to reflect on what’s already been said, new information comes in.

By contrast, how might this work in Chandler?

You take the first message and you immediately break it down into separate items:

• List of open issues
• Spin out issue #2 because you already know you want to start up a list of questions about it that others can contribute to and perhaps answer.
• Possible options to resolve … becomes it’s own list
• Split out option … as it’s own item because like issue #2, you already have more information about aaa that you want to track.
• Each next action becomes its own item

Now, you and your group have a loosely structured space to fill in as you make progress on closing open issues, answering questions and completing next actions.

People can “respond” by:

• Adding more open issues to the open issues list.
• Spinning off issues as independent items as soon as they start working on resolving them
• Adding more questions to the questions about #2 item.
• Creating more next actions as they emerge.
• Update their status on next actions on the next action item itself.

In this way, Chandler allows you to “break apart” complex discussions into their component issues, questions, next actions and running lists so that as you progress (individually and as a group), you have a modicum of “organization” where you can create issue-centric places to collect and store ideas, thoughts, questions, status updates, etc. As a result, “discussion” about open issues happen on items dedicated defined around the issue, task, idea you’re grappling with, not mixed up in long email threads that cover a potpourri of topics relevant to the project.

That is the key difference between Chandler and Email.

Email collaboration unfolds around discussions, which can meander and bloom into unmanageable, tangled threads from which it becomes impossible to extract a “source of truth” about what’s actually going on.

In Chandler, collecting a list of open issues or questions becomes a shared task in a shared workspace where everyone can see and edit the same list.

I’ve just put together a candidate build for Chandler Desktop 0.7.7. Besides some cleanup of the startup/shutdown UI, this is primarily a bugfix release: You can find the full list of 19 bugs addressed here.

This will almost certainly be the last in the 0.7.x series: We’ll be spending the next few weeks to a month fixing bugs, and preparing to release version 1.0.

Updated to add: The build is available for testing here. Also, choosing “Check for Test Updates” from the “Tools” menu should take you to this page.

Updated to add: 0.7.7 was released on June 22, 2008: Get the official release on the chandlerproject home page.

Ever 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 recently figured out a way to do this for Linux. See his detailed instructions below!

I downloaded the deb package for the latest version of Screenlets.

Once you have installed Screenlets,

1. Press alt+f2 and enter screenlets-manager to open the Screenlets Manager.
2. Click [Install] to open the Install dialog.
3. Choose [Convert Web Widget] from the list.
4. Click [Ok].

The Convert Widget dialog will pop up.

1. Leave the pulldown on Google Gadgets.
2. [Click Go to web page].

You will be taken to the iGoogle Gadget Directory.

1. Find the Chandler Quick Entry Widget.
2. Click View Source in the bottom, right-hand sidebar.

Copy the code.

1. Go back to the Convert Widget dialog and paste this code into the edit box below the Step 2 … label:
2. Give the widget a name (e.g: Chandler Quick Entry).
3. Click [Ok].

From the Screenlets widgets bar, double-click to launch the newly added Chandler Quick Entry widget. (You can also search to find it. (Screenshot taken from the Screenlets website.)

You can configure it to auto-launch on startup and create a desktop shortcut for it as well! Great!

As part of our drive to improve usability based on feedback from our Preview Release, we are proud to announce a new website, Product Tour, Product Demos and Get Started Guide.

The biggest thanks truly goes to the users who have written into the Chandler-Users list with feedback and detailed descriptions of how they use Chandler and why it works for them. Through their insights, we have honed the way we talk about Chandler to speak more directly to the problems people are looking for solutions for.

We have been blogging these user stories here and have compiled a User Stories Gallery as a part of the Product Tour.

We consider all of this material, a continuous work-in-progress and welcome feedback and comments either here on the blog, or on the Users list.

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.

One of the more common questions we get is: Can I use Chandler for email?

The short answer is no.

The longer answer is: Email plays an important, integral role in Chandler. However, Chandler today does not yet meet the email needs of most people.

Still, amongst task management tools (OneNote, Basecamp/Backpack, Things, OmniFocus, Palm) the degree to which Chandler has integrated email (and calendaring) is unique.

Here is a run-down of the email features already in the product today versus what still needs to be done:

What’s working:

• Send Chandler notes and events out as email. (Unlike “regular” email, you can edit and re-send Chandler emails.) Instructions.
• Receive Chandler notes and events via email sent by other Chandler users.
• Add messages from your email client into special Chandler IMAP folders to download them into Chandler where you can manage them as Chandler notes and events. Instructions.
• Reply and Forward
• Independent windows for composing messages

What still needs to be done:

• Download Flagged messages into Chandler
• Download all email into Chandler
• Attachments
• Sync IMAP Flags and Read/Unread status
• Sync IMAP Folders with Chandler (especially Drafts and Sent)
• Rules for filtering messages into collections automatically
• Junk mail detection
• Conversation threads
• Rich text editing for composing emails
• Spell-check

I imagine that different people will “require” different sets of features in order for Chandler to meet their email needs.

We recognize the central importance of email in personal task management and remain committed to expanding support for email. It is certainly on the short list of product areas we hope to build a healthy developer community around.

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!