OSCON wrapups from various OSAF folks have started to appear:

• Adam Christian
• Ted Leung
• Brian Moseley
• Mikeal Rogers
• Matthew Eernisse

Update: added reports from Mikeal Rogers and Matthew Eernisse

OSCON is next week in Portland and a number of folks from the Chandler project will be there.

Wednesday morning, Ted Leung and Mimi Yin will be giving a presentation “Open Design, Not by Committee”, about our experiences incorporating designers into an open source development process.

Katie Parlante will be giving a Chandler project update during the “State of Lightning Talks” on Thursday morning

Also on Thursday morning, Mikeal Rogers and Adam Christian will be talking about Windmill, the tool that we use to test the AJAX based user interface for Chandler Server (Cosmo).

There will also be a Chandler BOF on Thursday night, so please come by and say “Hi”. Since the Preview release is just around the corner, now would be a great time to check in and find out what’s been happening.

We are very happy to have the following students working on projects this summer:

Tim Pokorny will be working with Bobby Rullo on “Comet Event Notification for Cosmo UI”

Phil Jones will be working with Jeffrey Harris on “Natural Language Processing with Chandler”

Vera Sheinman will be working with Jeffrey Harris on “Progress Reports Management”

More information on the projects is available here <http://code.google.com/soc/osaf/about.html>

Welcome!

We are pleased that OSAF will again be participating in Google’s Summer of Code program in 2007. We had a very positive experience with Summer of Code last year, and hope that we’ll have an even better experience this year.

This year, we have project opportunities on the Chandler, Cosmo, and the Windmill projects. You can see our list of projects here, or propose your own project related to Chandler, Cosmo, or Windmill.

If you are a student and interested in applying to the Google Summer of Code program, you can use Google’s web application to apply.

As of version 0.7 alpha3 of Chandler, OSAF is changing the license for the Chandler desktop product to the Apache 2.0 License (our Cosmo and Scooby codebases are already Apache Licensed). Previous versions of Chandler were licensed under the GNU GPL because we thought that we would pursue a MySQL style dual licensing scheme as part of the sustainability plans for the Foundation. We no longer plan to pursue this kind of scheme in order to acheive our sustainability goals, and we want to reduce the number of open source licenses in use at OSAF.
Those interested in the complete discussion on this topic can look at the archives of the OSAF ‘general’ mailing list: <http://lists.osafoundation.org/pipermail/general/2006-May/000248.html>

Welcome to our Google Summer of Code students:

Elliot Lee	Cosmo Atom Publishing	Mentor: Brian Moseley
Ernesto Rivera	Chandler: Contacts/Address Book enhancements	Mentor: Grant Baillie
Xun Luo	Multivariate Analysis for PIM Data	Mentor: Philippe Bossut

We’re looking forward to working with you. Thank you to all the students who applied — the application process was very competitive this year.

Today is the first day for students to register for projects via Google’s Summer of Code program. We have a number of ideas for student projects, so please check out our list. If you are interested in something that isn’t listed, you can send a note to any of the OSAF mailing lists.

OSAF is going to have a slightly larger than normal presence at PyCon this year. Three members of the OSAF staff are giving presentations

1. Grant Baiilie is talking about Zanshin, our CalDAV client library.
2. Jeffrey Harris is talking about VObject, a library for working with vCalendar, iCalendar, and vCard files.
3. Brian Kirsch is talking about how to internationalize a Python application, using Chandler as an example, and touching on the use of PyICU.

We are also having a BOF on Saturday, and a sprint on Monday and Tuesday.

Please say hi if you are around!

A few weeks ago, we had some sprints for the OSAF staff. These were kind of blue sky sprints and people worked on pretty much whatever they felt like (if you are looking for cool project ideas related to Chandler, there are a bunch of those there as well).

Morgen had worked up a simple XML-RPC server which allowed him to build an OS X Dashboard widget that could get information out of Chandler. That, discussions we’ve had about building a simple command line interface into Chandler, and the KGTD Quicksilver Action were the inspiration for a quick hack.

The KGTD Quicksilver action allows you to use Quicksilver’s text entry facilities to dump ideas or reminders or whatever into KGTD right from Quicksilver. It provides a quick, unobtrusive mechanism for collecting stuff that you need to get out of your head and into your Getting Things Done (GTD) system.

What I did was to do a similar thing, but instead of sending the text to KGTD, I send the text to Chandler via XML-RPC. And instead of sending just a piece of text, I implemented a very stupid command line interface to Chandler. The XML-RPC servlet and the command line processor are now checked into Chandler’s subversion repository, and the QuickSilver AppleScript is checked into my OSAF sandbox: http://svn.osafoundation.org/sandbox/twl/applescripts/ToChandler.scpt. The script ended up being very simple, because AppleScript has built in support for XML-RPC handling. In fact, the code is so short, that I’ll just include it here, too.

-- Invoke applescript with text
-- 1. Activate QuickSilver and select this script.

– 2. Tab to the next and select Process Text..
– 3. Tab to the final pane and enter the command line text


using terms from application “Quicksilver”
    on process text ThisClipping
        tell application “http://localhost:1888/xmlrpc”
            set returnValue to call xmlrpc {method name:”commandline”, parameters:ThisClipping}
        end tell
    end process text
end using terms from

This is mostly a cool developer hack at the moment, but it gives you a taste of things you could do to integrate better with the native platform, as well as demonstrating the power of having some server functionality built into a desktop application. Of course, in an ideal OS X world, we’d have an AppleScript dictionary for Chandler and just use AppleScript (instead of XML-RPC) to do all this. But that’s probably a topic for another post.

In the past few days we’ve gotten some kind mentions on BoingBoing and ArsTechnica. It’s great to see that people are interested in what we we are doing.

Unfortunately, there are a few factual errors in both articles. I’m sure that this is partially due to the long history of Chandler, and also to some of the very early articles about the project. The Chandler project has attracted a lot of attention, but a lot of things have changed over the course of the project.

Probably the largest error has to do with the role of Andy Hertzfeld. Andy was one of the original members of the Chandler team, and was one of the contributors to Vista, but he hasn’t been active on the Chandler project for a few years. Chandler as you see it is very different from Vista.

The world is looking for a competitor for Exchange, or so it seems, and that rubs off on us. Chandler didn’t come in to being with the purpose of competing with Exchange. It came into being because Mitch wanted a solution for small groups of people. Our initial target audience for Chandler is small workgroups. After that, our goal is supporting university scale usage.

There also seem to be some misconceptions about the size of the OSAF staff. Today there are 23 people on the Chandler development team at OSAF, including a full time UI designer, a QA person, and some managers. In addition, there are 5 people working on server related projects: Cosmo - a CalDAV sharing server, and Scooby, a web based calendar access application.

The current version of Chandler, 0.6 is focused on producing a usable calendar. Most of the work went into the calendar and not very much went into e-mail. The work that we’ve done so far is mostly under the hood. There’s support for IMAP and SMTP, which will work with Internet standard e-mail, so it’s not limited to a Chandler workgroup. We have yet more protocol level work to do, and there’s lots of UI work that remains to be done.

There was one important message that didn’t come across in either posting. We are looking for participation in the project. That means feedback on features, bug reports, bug fixes, other contributions, documentation, and so on. Please come visit us on one of the mailing lists, or on IRC.