The Chandler Project Blog

Chandler Hub has been updated to the latest version of Chandler Server 0.13.0.  Please report any problems.  Also, remember to upgrade Chandler Desktop to 0.7.5 to prevent any sharing problems with the security fixes introduced in Chandler Server 0.13.0.

Chandler Server 0.13.0 includes a major security fix that required some minor client side changes.  These changes were implemented in Chandler Desktop 0.7.5.  When Chandler Hub is updated to version 0.13.0 of the server, users of Chandler Desktop prior to version 0.7.5 may experience sharing problems.  To prevent such problems, all users of Chandler Hub are encouraged to upgrade to the latest version of Chandler Desktop, 0.7.5.

Chandler Desktop 0.7.5 is available for download for Windows, Mac, and Linux at:

http://chandlerproject.org/download

Interoperability is an important part of the Chandler Project vision.

Chandler is about trying to match the way people really work. And everyone uses lots of tools to get their job done. One of the first things people want to know when considering trying out Chandler software is “Will it work with what I already use? Can I switch back if I don’t like it? Will it work with the tools that friends of mine use?”

We believe the answer to all these questions is “YES”! You can safely and productively start using one or more of the Chandler Project components on top of your existing toolset. Go ahead, try it out! Read more below to learn the details.

For a bullet-list summary of our best-available notes on specific applications and which features are supported with each, see our interop overview.

Import/export

The gold standard of calendar transfer is the “ICS” file (in iCalendar format). Most calendar and task list applications support both import and export of ICS files.

You can try out Chandler Desktop without switching from your current setup. Just export one or more ICS files from your current application, then import those files into Chandler Desktop (continuing to use your current app). To switch over permanently, just export+import again a final time!

If you later decide you’d like to change again, you can export ICS files from Chandler Desktop or Chandler Hub, using those files for import into a wide variety of applications.

We’ve seen import and export work for Outlook 2003/2007, Mozilla Lightning/Sunbird, Apple iCal, and others; it should work with a great many apps, probably yours included.

Note that Outlook doesn’t export full information by default; we’ve found this $10 application from littlemachines produces high-quality exports from Outlook that work well with Chandler Desktop.

In practice, doing ICS import/export can have gotachas. Not all application combinations/roundtrips are 100% perfect. We urge you to keep backups and try out import/export before committing your important data to any application. In Chandler Desktop, we’ve spent a lot of time tuning our import/export routines to handle as many variants and details as we can. Chandler Desktop properly handles events, tasks, timezones, recurrence, and other details. Please report any import/export problems you encounter.

We’ve put together some additional information about import/export with Chandler Desktop specifically, so check that for additional hints and notes.

Synchronization

ICS import/export is great for transferring your data between apps, but it’s a manual process not suited to keeping multiple applications in sync. Usually when you import a data set, your app will overwrite changes you may have in your local copies of those events. It’s hard to make changes in two separate apps.

Chandler Desktop and Chandler Hub both support multiple network sync protocols. Where other applications (Outlook, iCal, etc) overlap at least one of these protocols, interoperability is possible on at least some level.

One main idea to keep in mind when thinking about these various systems is whether a scheme is “read-only” or “read-write” (ie, bidirectional). It seems like read-only (or 1-way) interoperability works more reliably today, but protocols like CalDAV promise a new era of real-time, 2-way synchronization of calendar data between lots of free and for-pay applications and web services.

The big news is that you can do 2-way/read-write calendar and task synchronization today, both privately and shared with other people. Here’s a list of the main ways to do that, based on Chandler Project software.

Webcal, 1-way sync

The most simple network protocol is to take an ICS file (see above in import/export) and post it to the web, so various apps can download it (redownloading to check for changes periodically). This system is called webcal.

Chandler Desktop works great for subscribing to a number of public webcal URLs and overlaying them all on one canvas. This is a great way to keep track of lots of calendars.

If you store any events/tasks on Chandler Hub, then you can login to get a URL that you can enter into the right spot in Outlook, Apple iCal, Google Calendar, Lightning/Sunbird, Evolution, Zimbra, and many other apps to synchronize that Hub calendar with your app. This is always a read-only/1-way procedure.

Using webcal, in Outlook 2007, you can overlay say personal or family Hub calendars on top of your Exchange/Outlook calendars you use at work. (Look for “Internet Calendar” features in Outlook’s help.) If you make a change on the Hub or Chandler Desktop and then synchronize, you’ll see that change in your work Outlook’s display.

You can also subscribe to Hub calendars in Outlook 2003, but only view the calendars side-by-side. Other apps like iCal, Lightning/Sunbird, Google Calendar, and Evolution all support overlaying the Hub calendar with other calendars.

Many applications, Outlook included, can also publish a webcal calendar to a web server. You can use Chandler Hub as a destination server for most of these webcal-publishing apps. This works, but please note this does not provide a web UI for that calendar, and it’s again a 1-way publication. The original application will very likely not detect any changes made to this webcal file on the server.

Webcal, 2-way sync

Chandler Desktop can also do 2-way synchronization via webcal. Most applications treat a webcal file as read-only or write-only, but Chandler Desktop will check for changes in a webcal file it is monitoring and integrate those changes. If used with another application that also checks for changes, you get 2-way synchronization. We know Lightning/Sunbird does this (though you might chose to use CalDAV to synchronize instead).

CalDAV, 2-way sync

CalDAV is an emerging standard protocol for open calendar exchange. It’s not a protocol that’s used directly between two clients (like ICS files are), but rather defines a calendar server to which multiple clients can subscribe and synchronize. Chandler Hub also provides a read-write web UI to any calendar you store or use in your account.

The Open Source Applications Foundation via the Chandler Project was an early supporter of CalDAV. Together, our Chandler Desktop application and Chandler Server server product are some of the oldest and most mature implementations of the CalDAV standard and we plan to continue that support.

Chandler Hub is, as far as we know, essentially the leading free CalDAV service offered to the public. Given a fully-cooperating CalDAV client (Lightning/Sunbird, iCal 3.x, and Evolution all cooperate to various degrees), you can use these other clients regularly or occassionally and even use Chandler Desktop for advanced work (like sharing a single item between multiple calendars).

Chandler Desktop can subscribe to and publish a collection (calendar+events) to any CalDAV server (Apple Calendar Server, RSCDS, Bedework), or actually any WebDAV server (Apache mod_dav, .Mac, etc). Both of these mechanisms support bidirectional (read-write) synchronization, so multiple applications or people can all create, edit, and delete events and tasks any time they want, using the application of their choice.

iCal 3 (in Apple 10.5 “Leopard”) is a great new CalDAV-using PIM client. You can use it to make changes to your Hub collection, and still be able to use the Hub web UI to make changes from anywhere. Note that iCal 3 supports read-write calendars only to calendars in your account. Chandler Desktop and Chandler Hub let you subscribe to shared collections owned by other users with full read-write access.

Email integration

Chandler Desktop is not a complete email client; it is rather intended to complement your existing email client. The mechanism we use is to create dedicated Chandler folders on your IMAP server. Using your regular email client (Outlook, Thunderbird, Mail.app, Evolution, etc), you just drag an email from your inbox into a Chandler folder, where the message will be parsed for event, task, and other information.

You should also be able to send email update of items from Chandler Desktop using just about any outgoing mail server available. Events emailed this way appear as ICS attachments. We’ve tested Exchange, Postfix, Gmail, Yahoo mail, and Hotmail/MSN among others.

A month ago, I wrote about next steps for the Chandler project after our reformulation as a smaller, more agile team. Since then we’ve made the plan concrete — here is a summary of the goals and a few pointers to specific work queues.

Mimi described the goals nicely in a post to the chandler-dev list…

1. Get Chandler in front of more users, aka: Make it more viral.

Product changes:

* Item sharing: a new workflow to use the web to collaborate on just one item. We’ll “widgetize” this functionality, making it available in other contexts like iGoogle or on an iPhone.
* Improve web UI “ticket views” so subscribers can more easily subscribe to collections in applications they already use
* Improve existing use cases for iCal and Lightning users (sharing with Chandler users, using Chandler Hub)

Marketing and Evangelism:

* Improve our pitch, improve our web presence
* Better demos, user testimonials
* Reach out and talk to people about Chandler in other spaces

2. Make Chandler more appealing to new users, aka: Reduce barriers to getting started.

Reduce the number of new concepts users need to understand in order to get started:

* Pare down UI, de-emphasizing email UI
* De-emphasize notion of “Item” and replace with “Note”
* Remove explicit “Task” and introduce “Star”

Improve the web UI experience for people not using Chandler desktop (iCal/Lightning or Hub only users):

* smooth out sharing workflows
* auto-triaging CalDAV events
* make Notes field in detail view more usable

3. Make it easier for new users to ramp up to using Chandler every day.

Add two additional “widgets” with features that allow people to use Chandler in other contexts:

* Notifications: Users can send themselves or others notifications about changes to shared collections. This also counts towards the first goal, as it allows current users to share some Chandler functionality with other people. Notifications will be available first as an iGoogle widget (and potentially other similar contexts), and eventually also as email, SMS, or IM messages.
* Quick Entry: this widget will allow users to enter items into Chandler Hub from other contexts: iGoogle, iPhone, OSX and Vista widgets. Eventually we’d like to allow similar functionality through forwarding email to a particular address.

Work Queues and Releases

The work described above has been broken down into tasks and bugs and is prioritized into two work queues, one for the desktop and one for all of the web related work. Grant is marching down the desktop queue while everyone else tackles the web queue. We meet daily to cover progress, adjusting the work queues if priorities change. (Mockups and specs for the new widgets and web UI changes are also linked from the web queue.)

* Web Work Queue
* Desktop Work Queue

The plan is to do a desktop release and a server release once a month. Usually these won’t need to be coordinated — though in this next round we have a security bug that involves both.

Phillip’s work on the desktop rearchitecture is the exception. He’s posting about his work over on the PEAK list. We may move Chandler desktop over to this architecture after the 1.0 — we’re waiting to see how this plays out to make the call on that.

Milestones

We plan on hitting a few major milestones by early summer — these are the big goals we are shooting for:

* Web Widgets: Quick Entry, Notifications, Item Sharing — we’d like to have these deployed in a few contexts.
* Desktop 1.0: We’re pretty close to releasing a 1.0 desktop. Prior to launching this we want to make sure some web UI improvements go up on the Hub, and make some changes to the website.
* Server 1.0: With some security fixes, authentication work, and a few other items (e.g. the ability to disable account signups), we should be able to release a 1.0 for people who want to run their own server.

We don’t need to coordinate all of these milestones — we may hit some more quickly than others.

Changes to the Plan

We were thinking we’d put minimal investment into the existing web ui, figuring that we’d do a better job on the web use cases we want to hit with the web widgets. Once started thinking through both the web and desktop use cases, we realized we really do need to make some investment in the existing web ui. We’ve added web ui bugs to the web queue.

We decided to put off working on a Thunderbird plugin, for two reasons: (1) after doing a bit of research it was starting to look like a more sizable investment than we initially thought and (2) we worried about having too many projects.

The Chandler Hub has been updated to Cosmo 0.7.5. Since the last announced Hub update, we’ve updated the service five times with new bugfix releases of Chandler Server (Cosmo).

The major improvements include:

• Full UI support for Safari browsers
• Multiple fixes to triage status handling between Chandler Desktop and Chandler Server
• Supports browsers set to widths greater than 1600 pixels
• URLs presented for webcal-based downloads now working
• Support for more punctuation characters in titles
• Editing recurring events works better in multiple situations
• Fix for the edited-by column in the dashboard view to show more useful data
• Multiple bugs fixed which were creating user-visible error messages
• Lots of individual feature and visual improvements and bug fixes

Please see the Cosmo blog channel for additional information about each individual release.  More neat features appear on the horizon from new Cosmo development.

As always, we welcome individuals and groups to try the free and open Chandler Hub service in addition to other Chandler Project components.

The Chandler Project is pleased to announce the 0.7.3 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.

Chandler Server 0.7.3 is currently 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_0.7.3

Send us feedback at the open mailing list:

chandler-users at osafoundation.org

We look forward to hearing from you!

This is a bugfix release for Chandler Server 0.7.2 and is recommended
for general usage.

This release fully supports Apple Safari 2.x

The bugs fixed in this release are:

8088 Changing a recurrence rule in the middle of series should…
10240 Safari Creating new events broken
10491 Dojo isn’t in about box list of technologies
10576 Extra day added to recurring event
10674 unstamping recurring event as stamp leaves modifications …
10751 Modified occurence on a bi-weekly doesn’t show up
10826 Can’t access share with ticket URL
10836 Subscribe with: pulldown displays wrong URL
10872 Duration object doesn’t parse, add weeks.
10883 Selecting items in Dashboard is broken…

A summary of known issues in this release is available:

http://chandlerproject.org/knownissues

Thanks for your interest in Chandler Server!

The Chandler Project is pleased to announce the 0.7.1 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.

Chandler Server 0.7.1 is currently 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_0.7.1

Send us feedback at the open mailing list:

chandler-users at osafoundation.org

We look forward to hearing from you!

This is a bugfix release for Chandler Server 0.7.0 and is recommended for general usage.

The bugs fixed in this release are:

Bug 8325: Need feedback to the user (dialog box) when user has added a collection (or the same collection)
Bug 8336: Adding the same collection to your account
Bug 8595: Collection Details dialog: Renaming a collection adds the old name into the drop down list of collections
Bug 9686: Safari: mutiple selections in the list view is confusing
Bug 9863: Safari: Account browser setting doesn’t work
Bug 10214: prevent users from being able to add same collection to account twice
Bug 10231: Safari: Can’t create new item with quick entry in ticketed mode
Bug 10287: Account Browser: Dav link errors when timeout has been exceeded
Bug 10497: timezone changes getting reset when switching views
Bug 10501: sending deletion of modification that doesn’t exist results in it being created
Bug 10523: User can scroll the dashboard page and “lose” the header
Bug 10608: IE6/IE7 modifying recurring series, creates extra event that throws an error
Bug 10628: Cal canvas, setting an event title to: ,./;’[]\<>?:”{}| processes forever
Bug 10684: Deleted event still appears in calendar view
Bug 10692: sharing alarms on a published collection throws a 500 Server Error
Bug 10705: migration from 0.6.0.1 to 0.6.1 fails

A summary of known issues in this release is available:

http://chandlerproject.org/knownissues

Thanks for your interest in Chandler Server!

I’m pleased to announce that the Chandler project has hit our Preview milestone! We now have public-beta quality releases of our products; we believe them to be full featured enough and stable enough for daily use. Check out a full overview of features (including screenshots and screencasts). Download Chandler Desktop, create an account on Chandler Hub. Check out the source. Get involved in the project, help us build a really great 1.0 release.

Chandler Desktop
We released 0.7.0.1 of the Chandler Desktop yesterday, September 10. (In the spirit of responding to user feedback quicky, we fixed a problem with the release found by a user before we made the announcement).

Chandler desktop adds a central dashboard for managing tasks, notes, events, and messages to the basic calendar functionality found in the 0.6 release. You can share calendars, task lists, messages and notes in collections that can hold whatever you choose to put in them, regardless of data type. The performance has improved greatly, the application has basic search functionality, and now there’s a way to to manage and resolve conflicts on shared data. You can collaborate on individual items via email with the ability to edit and update messages you’ve already received or sent. Although Chandler Preview is not meant to replace your email application, you can configure your IMAP account so that Chandler can see some messages from your regular mail client.

We’re currently planning a 0.7.1 release in about a month, to quickly iterate on the Preview release. We’ll make use of user feedback to identify problems and drive priorities.

Chandler Hub
We upgraded Chandler Hub to the 0.7.0 release of Chandler Server on August 27th.

The latest release of Chandler Hub also adds a dashboard for managing tasks (and other kinds of data) to basic web calendaring features. Friends and family can access shared collections from the web without having to create an account or log in. We’ve focused on workflows that let desktop users share data with others using the web; this release is a major step towards realizing the full Chandler vision on the web as well as the desktop.

We’ll be upgrading the service with small fixes on a weekly basis for the next month or so, fixing minor glitches and adding support for Safari.

Chandler Server
The Chandler Server 0.7.0 release is available for download as a ready-to-run bundle. We’ll be creating 0.7.x releases as we improve the Hub service. In parallel, we’re working on a 0.8 release that is focused on interoperability with other calendar applications and services such as iCal, Google Calendar and Evolution.

Try out Chandler
We believe you can now feel confident putting your data in Chandler. We have migration features to make upgrading easier, and will do our best to support people if they run into problems. (The chandler-users@osafoundation.org mailing list is a great forum for support). These releases do have some bugs and rough edges, so Chandler might not yet be appropriate for mission critical uses. We are using the desktop and hub internally day to day for our office calendar, personal calendars, personal project management, and several small group task lists. We hope you’ll join us using Chandler — let us know how you like it! We’ll use your feedback to make a better 1.0 release.

Get Involved
One of our goals for this Preview milestone is to grow outside involvement with the project. We want users to log bugs. We want designers to collaborate with us on ideas. We want developers to submit patches fixing bugs that annoy them, create desktop plugins with their favorite features, and write clients that take advantage of their data on the server. Check out how to get involved.

The Chandler Project is running an open service named Chandler Hub. Or at least, that’s what we’ve been telling ourselves.

The term “open service” does not have the clear definitions and history of its cousins “open source” and “free software“. We’re trying to figure out, just like everyone else, what it means to be an open service.

There has been a recent surge of chatter about “open services“. The current focus seems to have two branches: 1) attempts to define the term “open service” and 2) discussion of the impact of closed services to the larger Internet public good. This surge was probably triggered by Luis Villa’s recent work for the GNOME Online Desktop project. Luis takes care to catalog excellent references to earlier work as well. There’s a healthy conversation on the Open Knowledge Foundation’s okfn-discuss mailing list, where Rufus Pollack just posted a draft of an open service definition.

How the new titans of web services approach the openness of their offerings has an importance it did not have five years ago. Tim O’Reilly has promoted the view:

…the fundamental challenge of the Web 2.0 era may not be free software but free data, and the right of users to view, delete, modify, or freely transfer to a competing service the data that is stored about them in centralized databases…

OSAF (the Open Source Applications Foundation) with its Chandler Project and related hosted service Chandler Hub, seems positioned within both these areas: free/open software as well as free/open data. The ideals of freedoms and the public good are embedded in OSAF’s DNA and our self-standards are high. We would love to hear about areas we can improve.

A persistent criticism of many of the most popular web services is “Where’s the source?!” Whatever Google’s goals for openness are otherwise, no one realistically expects them to release their revenue-center source code. So people focus on the most important substitute: data access through open standards and open protocols. Groups like MoveMyData envision a generic tool for bulk download/upload of “your data” to sites like Flickr, YouTube, MySpace, and blogger, including your own web servers. Others dream that application-layer protocols like Atompub, CalDAV, or CardDAV, etc will be widely adopted and provide user freedoms through interoperability. Others worry about identity management, so links to treasured pictures online don’t go bad when a service changes operations (the broken URL problem).

The Chandler Hub service though, is the “full package”, multiple open apis for data and fully open source. (We have not quite solved the broken URL problem though.) The Hub is a straight install of Cosmo (the Chandler Server). Cosmo is an Apache 2-licensed open source “PIM sharing server” with a built-in web UI. Coupled with consumer-friendly terms of service, we have the makings of a fully-open hosted service.

OSAF, a non-profit organization, did not build Cosmo specifically to run a service; the original thought was that workgroups might run their own (like SMTP and web servers) and that they would form a loose network of cooperating servers. (The original Chandler vision was even framed in terms of true peer-to-peer, similar to Kragen Sitaker’s 2006 proposal for how to achieve open services).

As OSAF approached its Preview launch, it seemed clear that running a free service, providing easy sharing, synchronization, and a web interface was an important enabler for people trying out the Chandler Project. Some people will not have access to a private server, so without a low-hassle (and free-to-use) service, they would be blocked from using some parts of the Chandler Project.

Whatever the history, we find ourselves today launching a remarkably open service. Do we measure up to emerging definitions of open services?

Villa’s model for open services asks for the full package, source code included. It contains three preconditions:

1. data access (ability to retrieve data in open formats)
2. source access (ability to interact with your data locally once retrieved)
3. hardware access (ability to run on various sized-hardware)

and three rights: use, modify, redistribute.

Users of Chandler Hub have full data access via multiple open standard protocols (Atompub, CalDAV, and Webcal). Full source access available in OSAF’s public subversion repository and hardware access spans from laptops through large, clustered servers. Even our admin scripts and runbook are available.

So it seems fair to say that Chandler Hub rates well on Villa’s preconditions for an open service. Huzzah!

How we’re judged for the three rights of use, modify, and redistribute should depend on our exact and our adherence to those terms. We want to provide every consumer right expected in this area.

The issues in crafting an open terms of service are trickier than they appear: while you own your data, you can’t be mad at us if we “break your stuff” if there were say a server corruption or downtime. It turns out you actually need to grant the service important rights (store, transmit, etc), not the other way around. Also, when you share an item with others where you both have a right to edit, who has a right to delete it later? Some open service definitions expect community-generated data to be licensed under say the Creative Commons licenses, how does that apply to what Chandler Project is doing (with shared, but possibly private data)?

It turns out, that while drafting this post about open services, the Chandler Project just posted our first public terms of service and privacy policy. Experience suggests that there will be at least a couple of places where we did not write down what we actually meant. We’ll need a longer track record before we can be judged on our implementation of our terms, but we encourage you to let us know how our terms of service document looks, how the privacy policy looks, and how you think we’re doing on this critical dimension of an open service.

So there’s our claim: we’re running an open service, providing both open data and open source, backed by a non-profit motivation and consumer-friendly terms. We’d like to accomplish a few things here:

• Get community feedback on our terms of service and privacy policy
• Highlight the importance of the other end of the browser connection in Mozilla’s vision of the Open Web
• Have people working on “open service” definitions consider how the Chandler Hub ranks on their openness scales
• Encourage open service definitions to address further the thorny problem of appropriate terms of service
• Plug the Chandler Hub service. Check out our system and tell us what you think!

Thanks in advance for any feedback you can provide and also thanks for your interest in the Chandler Project!

We just updated Chandler Hub to Chandler Server 0.7.0! The update was smooth and no one has reported significant issues. Enjoy the new feature enhancements!

In particular, Chandler Hub now demonstrates more pieces of the Chandler vision. In particular, the Hub now supports not only tasks, but Chandler item “stamping” which lets a event also be a task and vice versa. Your tasks and events can be viewed and “triaged” on a unified web dashboard.

This Hub update has been tested to support the upcoming Chandler Desktop Preview release. If you’re using older versions of Chandler Desktop, we suggest considering upgrading to a recent release. While the final Chandler Desktop Preview has not been released, RC2 is currently available and is the best available version. If you prefer to wait for the final released version, no problem; that should be coming soon.

You are invited to use Chandler Hub for daily usage or testing of Cosmo 0.7.0. We’re a small service, but we will do our best to keep your data secure and always available for your use.

We should note that are known issues in Safari support for this 0.7.0 version of Chandler Hub. Also, IE 7 users may now receive a dialog upon logging in related to security settings. If ActiveX is disabled via custom settings, you may not be able to use the Hub. We’re working on fixes to both these issues; thanks for your patience!