The Chandler Project Blog

As noted by commenters on this blog, the Debian packages available for Chandler 1.0.3 don’t work on the newest Ubuntu release (9.04, a.k.a. Jaunty Jackalope). I fixed the problem in Chandler trunk a while back: It turned out that Python 2.6 introduced some errors that weren’t hard to address.

So, for Jaunty users only, there are now Chandler 1.0.3.1 Debian packages available here.

Thanks to Matt Schafer for suggesting this, and for reminding me after I completely forgot to send out the announcement when I came back from vacation a couple of weeks ago.

For the record, the bugs fixed in this release are:

• 12792 Chandler does not work under Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty
• 11059 Upgrade twisted to 8.2.0

The Chandler ecosystem gains a new member: ChandlerQE for Android. Your phone is always with you, so you can quickly send notes to the Chandler Hub, and then use Chandler Desktop or your desktop browser to manage your items.

When you first launch ChandlerQE for Android, it will ask for the Chandler Hub username and password. It will also try to automatically connect to the Hub to fetch your collections every time you change your username or password. The main UI consists of the title field, the content field, the collections list, and the send button. You can refresh your list of collections, and send notes to any of your collections.

This is also an experiment at doing something different in OSAF’s history. Even while OSAF had paid staff, there was ongoing discussion about how to make the foundation self-sustaining. The Apple AppStore and copycats have shown that people are willing to pay small amounts of money for mobile software. I proposed to OSAF that we try this out with ChandlerQE, and OSAF said yes. While ChandlerQE for Android is Open Source like everything else OSAF does, to download the installable package from Android Market or SlideME I am asking for a small fee. I will donate a percentage of the sales to OSAF.

You might also want to check out the initial release announcement.

One of the most common questions we get about Chandler is: Can I sync my Chandler data onto my mobile device?

The answer is Yes! While there aren’t full-featured Chandler mobile apps for all the various mobile platforms, you can sync Chandler data onto any device that can sync with or subscribe to calendars via .iCalendar or CalDAV.

Specifically, that means you can:

1. Publish your collections to Chandler Hub;
2. Subscribe to them with Apple iCal or Google Calendar;
3. Use either Apple iSync or Google Mobile to get your Chandler data onto your mobile device.

Currently Apple doesn’t sync To-do’s onto iPods or the iPhone, so you won’t see Chandler Notes on Apple’s devices. However, Apple iSync will sync To-dos onto Palm devices.

Google Calendar on the other hand, currently does not support tasks at all, so you can only sync events thru Google Calendar.

Apple iCal 3.x (Leopard) supports view-and-edit sharing via CalDAV, meaning you can make changes from your mobile device and they will sync back to Chandler. However, with Apple iCal 2.x (Tiger) and Google, you can only view your Chandler data.

There is a test build that supports 2-way view-and-edit sharing via CalDAV with Google. However, it has not yet been incorporated into the official release of Chandler desktop.

Liz Cademy wrote in with a success story linking Chandler to her iPod via iCal and iSync. I too, have been happily syncing 5 of my Chandler collections (events and notes!) to my new pink Palm Centro via iCal and iSync for a couple of weeks now. I’m thinking of finally upgrading from Tiger to Leopard so I can edit as well as view from my phone.

Has anyone else tried syncing to mobile devices in this way?

For a couple of months now, Chandler Hub has supported the ability to sync all of your Chandler data (not just events) onto other iCalendar or CalDAV to applications and tasks.

Chandler notes (starred or plain) should now show up in other iCalendar or CalDAV calendar applications (e.g. Apple iCal, and Lightning) as Tasks (VTODOS).

Here are instructions on how to subscribe to Chandler collections from other calendar applications. (Unfortunately, some Chandler-specific will be lost. e.g. NOW and LATER triage status will both be interpreted as “Not-Done”. Anytime events will look the same as All-day events.)

I also demo this in the second half of the new 3-Minute Feature Tour. Also available (lo-res) on YouTube.

Has anyone made use of this feature yet?

We are pleased to announce the release of Chandler 1.0, a “Note-to-Self Organizer” designed for personal and small-group task management and calendaring.

Chandler consists of a desktop application and Chandler Hub, a free sharing service and web application. You can also download and run your own Chandler Server.

Chandler is open source and standards-based.

What’s different about Chandler?

Chandler aims to provide a more integrated approach to managing information with:

• A Quick Entry Bar to enter everything from ideas to reminders and
  appointments.

• NOW-LATER-DONE Triage List to collect, process and track everything from deadlines and meetings to drafts and ideas.
• Tickler Alarms to auto-re-focus deferred (LATER) items to NOW
• An integrated, full-featured calendar designed for tracking meetings and events and tasks and deadlines.
• Back-up and Sharing: Manage personal and shared lists and calendars side-by-side. Back-up to the Chandler Hub sharing service, sync with other calendar apps and services, and sync your data across multiple computers and access it from the web.
• Lightweight integration with Email.

You can download Chandler Desktop, sign up for a free Chandler Hub account and get a tour of the product. Check out the source. And get involved in the project as we set our sights on growing our community. And send your feedback and questions to: chandler-users@osafoundation.org or chat with us on IRC!

We look forward to hearing from you!
The Chandler Team

What’s changed since Preview?

Chandler Desktop

• simpler interface
• streamlined upgrade experience
• streamlined set up for backup and sharing
• ability to re-order collections in the left-hand sidebar
• detachable detail view

Plus, 11th hour volunteer contributions for:

• clickable links in the notes field
• custom recurrence rules

Chandler Hub/Server

• streamlined sign-up experience
• better experience for subscribing with other apps and services (Apple iCal, Google)
• ability to invite others to share
• calendar overlays
• streamlined detail view
• new iGoogle Quick Entry widget that can also work on Linux desktop
• ability to sync all Chandler data (not just events) with Apple iCal, Lightning…
• upgraded web interface to Dojo 1.0.2
• back-end support for importing .ics calendar files
• back-end support for notifications
• back-end support for managing collections through the feed service.

Significant Bug Fixes

Chandler Desktop

• recurring events keep popping to NOW, marked as Unread
• sort LATER section chronologically

Chandler Hub/Server

• patched read-write sharing security issue
• make Triage Status sort consistent with Desktop
• occurrences more than a month in the future don’t show up in the Triage List

Complete lists of feature work and bug fixes for Desktop and Server.

New and improved documentation:

• New website: http://chandlerproject.org
• New Product Tour with a new demos
• Gallery of User Stories
• New Get Started Guide
• Updated documentation for Chandler Server

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.