The Chandler Project Blog

5 Responses to “Chandler versus Email”

1. Bryan Says:
   June 16th, 2008 at 10:35 pm

   This sounds great, but mustn’t Chandler add a wide variety of features to fully satisfy this use case? For example:
   1. Rich text formatting to facilitate ordinals and lists like you mention.
   2. Ability to hyperlink (or reference) other Chandler tasks (i.e., “Topic 2 has been broken into its own item, here: [insert link to new item]“).
   3. Ability to assign tasks to other people (or claim them for yourself), if they’re true action items.
   4. Versioning and history at the item level, to see who changed an item and when, and do diffs when necessary.
   5. Ideally, explicit support for sub-tasks so a complex discussion that has been broken apart into its component issues can maintain a coherent structure that links the pieces back into a coherent whole (though hyperlinks to items could emulate this).

   To really stand out as a process enabler, a few other features would be nice-to-haves:

   6. Item templates, allowing a “File->New->Meeting Notes” or File->New->Project Outline” workflow that pre-fills a framework like you mention. The current method of copying an existing item feels clunky at best.
   7. Categories/Keywords/Tags to facilitate search and varying organizational groupings.
   8. Optimally, a rules engine that auto-files items into collections based on a criteria (template, tag/category/etc).

   Right now, it feels like the use cases you describe are possible, but only implicit in Chandler. Are there plans to incorporate more explicit support for such workflows, like what I describe above?

2. Jos Says:
   June 17th, 2008 at 10:33 am

   I’m happy with having things remain implicit, to an extent. As has been mentioned in the mailing-list, a rich-text note area, with the ability to “link” to other items (and urls) would be a huge step up from what we already have.

   Attachments are coming, or at least planned, which is another big step up.

   Assignments, i’m not so sure about. You can do this by creating a shared collection, like “John Smiths Work To-Dos”, and people on the team, and yourself, can then put items into that collection which are assigned to you. You can also drag them into other peoples collections, if it is a shared task.

   Supporting things implicitly rather then explicitly can offer greater flexibility, rather then baking it into the UI/Architecture…

3. Mimi Yin Says:
   June 17th, 2008 at 12:25 pm

   Hi Bryan

   Thanks for writing up your thoughts.

   I’m 100% with you that all of the features you describe would improve the experience in Chandler. 1, 2 and 3 (rich text, links, assign tasks) are filed as bugs. 4-8 (versioning, sub-tasks, templates, tags, rules) have been heavily discussed. #6 (templates) is interesting. We’ve discussed it more as allowing users to define their own item-kinds and attributes. But templates is probably an easier meme for people to understand. You can read more about #6 under “Chandler as a Platform” – http://chandlerproject.org/Projects/NutshellCartoons#ChandlerModel

   However, this particular post is about usage patterns that I’ve observed first-hand or that users have described in detailed write-ups to the Users List. In other words, it’s how people are using Chandler today.

   What’s emerged since the Preview release is that even though other applications have different sub-sets of the functionality you describe (email has #s 1,2,7,8 and wikis have all but #s 3 and 5) very few are well suited to do the kind of “list management” described here.

   So with Chandler, we’ve been primarily focused on Triage (with Tickler Alarms) and an integrated Calendar to first address the the simple, yet intractable problem of “how to keep track” of “volatile information” (ever-changing, ever-expanding pile of ideas, issues, and deadlines)…and in particular, “how to keep track” of ever-changing lists that many different people contribute to and need access to.

   I realize that what’s worked for some people won’t necessarily work for others. But for our Preview users, Chandler’s Triage and Calendar capabilities have proven to be more central to managing their information than rich text, sub-tasks, and tags.

   So yes, I agree! There’s lots more to do and we hope to build an active developer community around making Chandler’s list management workflows more robust.

   However, I’m unsure about fully satisfying user needs (if you mean it in some objective sense). My personal feeling is that such a question can only yield highly personal and therefore highly variable responses depending on who you talk to. Instead, the way I think about what Chandler can accomplish is: Is it a competitive solution? Does it improve on what people are doing today? For those who have written in with their success stories, the answer is yes!

   Mimi

4. chiu ying Says:
   July 3rd, 2008 at 10:15 pm

   Nobody should set out to design a software that meets everyone’s need – she will die of exhaustion before anything comes to fruition. Chandler should first try to bring one major improvement to the current PIM market that most people would appreciate, then move on to the next. I am very tempted to try Chandler, after reading that it allows one email to be broken into threads: can it collapse, as well as expand, though? in other words, once it is broken into threads, can I still trace it back to the original email, with all the threads shown? that would be good. However, I am not diving into Chandler so fast because the website still does not explain clearly to new users how it will work. e.g. if I download the desktop, can I use my existing email accounts in yahoo and gmail in it, and does sharing / collaboration require everyone to install / join the Hub?

5. Mimi Yin Says:
   July 14th, 2008 at 7:17 pm

   Hi Chiu Ying,

   You can use your exisiting email accounts with Chandler. More instructions here.

   Chandler Hub is just a service you sign up for. But you can gain full access shared collections on Hub without signing up for an account. Again more instructions here.

   You can access the Get Started Guide from the Product Tour: http://chandlerproject.org/tour

   As for collapsing threads back together. Currently, it is not supported in the app. However, it’s definitely high on many people’s feature lists. We had a lot of design discussions around various ways to implement such functionality. Here is a bug for a first step towards realizing “linking items together into threads”: https://bugzilla.osafoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11822

   Best,
   Mimi

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