The Chandler Project Blog

I’m one of those people who uses their email inbox as
a task list. I keep emails around forever if I think there’s
something I need to do associated with that email. I file messages I
think I might refer to one day out of my inbox. Unfortunately, this
approach sometimes means I have a lot of email threads all clamoring
for my attention. It can be overwhelming.

One of Chandler’s appeals for me is the ability to manage lots of
different ideas, but only focus on a few at a time. The way focus
works in Chandler is that items are “triaged” to NOW, LATER, or DONE.

DONE is just like filing an email. NOW is like leaving the
email in my inbox. The big enhancement, for me, is LATER.

With the LATER section, you can mark a message as important to pay
attention to, but not right now. This risks becoming a gargantuan pit
of “someday, maybe” items, though, so you can also assign an alarm,
and that item will pop back to NOW in the future.

Now I can choose just a few things to keep in my NOW section, and
collapse the LATER and DONE sections so they don’t distract me.

One big problem with the LATER section, until recently, was that it
was sorted pretty arbitrarily. I have dozens of LATER items.
Birthdays, events months from now, reminders to do something next
month, and more. What I (and most users, from what we’ve heard on our
mailing lists) want is for the LATER section to sort according to
when an item will become NOW again.

I’m happy to announce that in our latest release (1.0rc1), the LATER
section sorts appropriately! For all you non-Chandler users reading
this, that may not seem like a big deal. But it has a surprisingly
big impact on my use of Chandler.

When LATER sorted arbitrarily, I spent a lot of my time going and looking at my calendar to
remind myself if I had upcoming events. Really, I don’t have enough
events to want a calendar view very often. Mostly, I just want to
know what’s coming soon. Now the LATER section gives me that.

I used to not bother assigning alarms to events. I’m not sure why, it
just felt like too much effort for not enough payoff. Being able to
see a prioritized-by-date list of LATER items pushes the
effort-to-payoff ratio to a point where I’m always assigning alarms to
anything I don’t want to think about right now. As a result, my NOW
section is much more manageable and I’m calmer about what I need to be
thinking about.

The Chandler Project is pleased to announce the 1.0.0 release of Chandler Server (Cosmo)!

Chandler Server is a server and Ajax web UI for managing and sharing calendars, events, and tasks. It implements open data standards including CalDAV, WebDAV, Atom, and Atompub.

This release contains bugfixes, stability improvements and general polish. For a more complete list of recently introduced features please see the release notes for our 0.16.0 release.

Chandler Server 1.0.0 is available for download as a ready-to-run bundle at:

http://chandlerproject.org/serverdownload

and the source code is available from subversion at:

http://svn.osafoundation.org/server/cosmo/tags/rel_1.0.0

Send us feedback at the open mailing list (no subscription required):

chandler-users@osafoundation.org

We look forward to hearing from you!

The bugs fixed in this release include:

• [Bug 12242] LATER items sorted above NOW items
• [Bug 12213] NPE in EntityConverter.setCalendarAttributes()
• [Bug 12214] NPE when writing html dir index
• [Bug 12225] unhandled ItemNotFoundException thrown by findItemByPath
• [Bug 12226] migration component doesn’t build on java 1.6
• [Bug 12236] modification links included in occurrence atom entries
• [Bug 12113] website needs feedback mechanism
• [Bug 12194] unable to create free-busy ticket using account browser
• [Bug 12206] exdate is added after “all future items” change
• [Bug 12261] Change copy for Apple iCal subscribe button in Ticket View
• [Bug 12270] “Invite” link for subscriptions potentially confusing

Keith recently wrote into the users list about how he uses Microsoft OneNote with Chandler and how he’d love it if the new clickable URLs feature worked for OneNote links as well. (Emphasis, mine.)

As I posted in my user story, I am hopelessly disorganised. I have a theory that if I buy enough plastic boxes, I’ll attain the miraculous state of ‘in control’. Bits of paper containing ‘notes to self’ used to be found months after they’d been written, by which time it was too late to do anything with them.

OneNote has become my one piece of paper. On my tablet PC, I can hand write notes as I’m on the phone to customers. I can use it creatively for something like mind mapping – free-form, different colours, engage both sides of the brain. I can print web pages to it, embed photos and web clippings, possible solutions to problems – anything relating to anything, and all shared between whichever machines I’m using at the time.

Chandler provides diary and task management capabilities, shared between myself and my wife. I tend to use OneNote for the ‘capture’ phase and for organising my thoughts, then Chandler manages the next actions, appointments, and reminders.

Typically, I create a list of actions in OneNote, hit a hot key in AutoHotKey and the selected action will be copied to clipboard and pasted to a new task in Chandler.

One feature of OneNote is a right-click “copy this page’s URL to clipboard” and I’m envisaging modifying my script to create a task in Chandler and then paste the URL of the OneNote page into Chandler’s notes field, providing a one-click link back to the original OneNote page. Also, I’m looking at an AutoHotKey script to copy a task in OneNote and paste it into Chandler’s search box, so that I’ve got a kludgey but fairly seamless each way link between items.

So nothing too complicated, just a quick means of linking items in each app to each other.

Note To make it so that Chandler recognizes OneNote URLs, you must first apply this patch. However, if enough OneNote users pipe up with feedback that this would be very useful, we will up the priority on making it so OneNote URLs work by default.

Note: Not real data.

As part of our 1.0 release, we’ll be hosting special live chat sessions on IRC for developers and users interested in contributing to the project. If you happen to be in the San Francisco Bay Area, you’re also invited to bring your laptop and join us in person.

User Support Hour

When: August 4, 2-3PM PDT
Where: IRC
Channel: #chandler

To kick things off, we’ll be holding User Support Hour. Please join us
if you’d like to share or learn how others use Chandler or simply want
help getting set up or troubleshooting a problem.

Then stick around and provide input for developers:

Scratch Your Chandler Itch

When: August 4, 3-5PM PDT
Where: IRC
Channel: #chandler

If you know a little Python, and would like focused help from the Chandler development team, we have a few projects we think might make good starter projects both for introducing Chandler’s code to new
developers and addressing real pain points in the product. Please feel free to add your own!

• More alarm snooze options
• Shortcut from the reminder pop-up to the item details
• More commands for the Quick Entry field (e.g. for filing items, etc)
• Download flagged emails (IMAP)
• Customize App Bar: Add Tasks, define a “Notes-only” area, etc)
• Print Triage List

See full list.

If you want to participate, start by checking out Chandler using SVN

Hack On Chandler Server

When: August 5, 3-5PM PDT
Where: IRC
Channel: #cosmo

We’ll finish off our community sessions with a session aimed at people conversant with Java or Javascript who’d like to improve the server.

• Port the iGoogle quick entry widget to iPhone, OSX Dashboard, Vista
  Sidebar, Yahoo Konfabulator

• UI for setting up Notifications (via email)
• UI for importing .ics calendar files through web UI

If you want to participate, start by checking out Chandler Server using SVN.

RSVP

We’d like to get a head count of who might participate. If you’re planning on attending, or if you’d like to participate but can’t make those times, please let us know by this Friday.

Thanks,
The Chandler Team

We recently released an early version of 1.0 which includes new support for clickable URLs in the notes field.

I’ve mostly been thinking of URLs in terms of web URLs, but a couple of users have been testing out the new URL functionality with file system links. Chandler can recognize URLs for files, folders, and applications.

So in addition to web URLs, you can also keep track of documents you’re working on with triage status, tickler alarms and the calendar.

I’ve been working on a Chandler Server feature that allows users to setup and receive a daily/weekly agenda via email that would include upcoming items for the day/week and also a list of items with a triage status of NOW. While this work isn’t done, I’ve discovered a way to get a daily agenda for a collection shared on Chandler Hub using Google Calendar. So in the mean time if you want an easy way to get a daily agenda via email (or SMS) you can do the following:

1. Log in to Chandler Hub and open collection details for collection you want to receive notifications for (click on down arrow next to collection name in collection list):

   

2. If it hasn’t been done already, click [Invite] to generate sharing links.
3. Right-click or Cmd-Click (Mac) on either one of the [Invite] link to Copy Link. (Note Collections you subscribed to will only display 1 “Invite” link, the link you used to subscribe.)
4. Log in to your Google Calendar account
5. In your calendar list, click on [Add] pulldown and select Add by URL

   

6. Paste the URL obtained in step 2 into Public Calendar Address field, changing “pim” to “webcal”. The URL should look something like: https://hub.chandlerproject.org/pim/collection/215715b0-5a0b-11dd-92a1-e12efc62301d?ticket=26htadc0
7. Click [Add]
8. In the calendar list, click on the down arrow and select Notifications

   

9. Setup daily agenda email or SMS

You are done! Google Calendar will automatically refresh the URL every few hours and will send a daily agenda to you at 5am every morning.

Of course there are some limitations. The email will go to your gmail account, the agenda only includes events, there is a possibility of data being out of date, there is no triage status information, and no way to link back to the original items on Chandler Hub. Of course, this is why we are currently developing these features for the server!

We have released an early version of Chandler 1.0. 1.0-rc1 has been tested internally but we are relying on the general user community to help us test with real data and real daily usage.

There have been a number of significant, new features since the 0.7.7 release including:

• bug 7612 Clickable URLs in the Notes field
• bug 8087 Support for more recurrence rules (e.g. 3rd Wednesday of every month, MTTh weekly, etc)
• bug 12234 Performance improvement: Replace weekly “purge” with “export/reload”. (Many users reported experiencing noticeable performance boosts when upgrading, which is when you typically export and reload your data.)
• bug 11774 The LATER section in the Triage List view now sorts correctly! Displaying events and reminders “in chronological order”. Items without event or custom alarms dates appear at the bottom of the LATER section.
• bug 12246 Alarms are overriding the event date in the Triage List date column.

Here is the complete list of 1.0-rc1 features and bug fixes.

So please help us by upgrading to version 1.0-rc1 and as usual, send reports of any issues you find to the chandler-users list or bugzilla. To upgrade, you can either
Check for updates in Chandler, or visit the downloads page.

We have released a special edition “Test Version” of Chandler Desktop in order to try out patches submitted by Nick Parlante for 2 oft-requested features:

1. Clickable links in the item notes field
2. Support more custom recurrence rules.

So please help us test by trying out these 2 new features! As usual, send feedback and report problems to The Chandler-Users mailing list.

The build is available here, or,
if you’re running 0.7.7 or later, via the Tools >> Check for Test Updates menu item.

Note for Mac and Linux: At this time, there is minimal support for visual feedback that links are clickable on Mac and Linux. Meaning, links will not be blue or underlined. However, if you mouse over a valid URL, your cursor should switch to the hand, and clicks should be handled correctly.

Aspiration, an organization that connects non-profits with software solutions will be hosting a free Chandler seminar to introduce Chandler’s personal and small-group task management and calendaring capabilities to potential non-profit users. Sheila (our product manager) and myself (product designer) will be there to demo Chandler and answer questions. Other members of the OSAF team may attend as well.

The seminar will be held at the San Francisco Technology Center at 1370 Mission Street near 10th Street on the 4th floor on Tuesday, July 22nd at 5PM.

If you work for a non-profit and would like to attend, please RSVP here.

We have been having a rather interesting conversation over at TechSoup, an online forum where non-profits can discuss and learn about available technology solutions.

The thread, originally begun with the title: “Chandler maturing as an Outlook alternative” has grown into a more general discussion of sustainability and open source projects and in particular, our own plans for building a volunteer development community.

Much of the conversation has revolved around how we maintain a user-centered focus as a project as we work to attract volunteer developers. (A challenge all consumer-facing open source projects face.)

Don C in particular has had some useful words of advice based on his experience on The Sahana Project.