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 pleased to announce the 0.7.0.1 release of Chandler Desktop!

Chandler Desktop is an open source, standards-based personal information manager (PIM) built around small group collaboration and a core set of information management workflows modeled on Inbox usage patterns and David Allen’s GTD methodology.

Chandler Desktop 0.7.0.1 is currently available for download here and the source code is available from subversion there.

Send us feedback on our chandler-users open mailing list. We look forward to hearing from you!

This release is a substantial improvement over Chandler Desktop 0.6.1 and is recommended for general usage. Changes in this release are summarized in the release notes.

The outline of changes is:

• New Triage workflow featuring the new Dashboard view
• Faster Sharing protocol
• Compatible with Chandler Server Web UI using a single Ticket URL mechanism
• Support for a OSAF hosted Chandler Hub free sharing service
• Support concurrent edit with merge and conflict management
• Support background auto Sync
• Improved Email capabilities with support for In and Out boxes, Reply/Forward
• New Edit/Update workflow allows Chandler data to be shared through email without using a server
• Support for special Chandler IMAP folders to automatize incoming email treatment and parsing
• Improved Calendar user interface: better visual, better Drag and Drop, new Preview area
• New Quick Entry widget allows easy entry of new data
• Improved Search
• Improved Security with support for encryption
• New Export/Reload version migration tool
• Many architectural improvements (performance, API, command line arguments, optional launch dialog, troubleshooting tools, etc…

A summary of known issues in this release is available.

Thanks for your interest in Chandler Desktop!

If you’ve been tracking our download page, you certainly noticed that we uploaded last week a brand new 0.7.0-rc1 to replace 0.6.1 as the default download. This is because we are very confident that this new release is already way better and more stable than the older version and, though we haven’t yet completed the whole suite of tests, we prefer having new users installing and using that newer version rather than the old one.

For one thing, this new version is fully exploiting the new capabilities of the newly released Chandler Server 0.7.0 now deployed on Chandler Hub (see Jared’s post). The new protocol (Morse Code) used by 0.7.0-rc1 is much faster than what we used before so sharing is really improved. Also the level of interoperability between the Desktop client and the new Web UI client is way better.

Second, having new users starting with the new Dashboard and Triage workflow is more in tune with what Chandler is all about now. It’s not your old “Calendar Application” anymore…

And last, the new version supports an “export/reload” feature so schema changes in the repository database do not become migration headaches and data loss is non existent. This is pretty important for users in general and new users in particular.

So, what’s separating us from a formal release announcement? Well, tests, tests and more tests. We’re currently getting through the complete list of test scenarios and test plans and we’re creating a new RC (Release Candidate) every other day or so. RC 2 is now up for download and we’re expecting another couple of RC to crop up between now and the final release, the one with the QA stamp of approval. When’s that? ETA is Monday September 10th. Considering the current rather low rate of bugs logged, we’re pretty confident we’ll make that date. After all, we’ve been in debug mode since 3 months now so super-scary-blow-up-the-house bugs are unlikely to crop up now. It’s more about corner scenarios and making sure we’re really complete in our assessment of the product quality before putting it in everyone’s hands.

In the meantime, if you’re daring enough and not afraid of a couple of bugs that could hide here and there, take a spin at the new Chandler Desktop 0.7.0-rc2 and help us make the wait even shorter by testing it in your own environment.

To all users of the osaf.us sharing service:

Thank you for using the free OSAF sharing service, osaf.us. As the August 2007 release of Chandler Preview approaches, the official OSAF sharing service will move to hub.chandlerproject.org.

Please help us by moving your data from osaf.us to hub.chandlerproject.org. We have written instructions for doing this using Chandler Desktop here:

http://chandlerproject.org/Projects/DavToEimMigrationUserDoc

Chandler Preview uses a faster and more capable sharing system named EIM, available for free on hub.chandlerproject.org. So you’ll need to move your data to the new server to use all the features of Chandler Preview.

Going forward, only hub.chandlerproject.org will receive software updates and our fastest servers. Eventually osaf.us will be turned off, so please help us by moving your data when you get a chance.

Moving your data is not difficult to do. You’ll need to create a new account on hub.chandlerproject.org and update your application configuration to publish to the new server. Your sharing URLs will also change so you might need to contact you’re sharing collections with and give them updated info.

If you need any assistance, you can get help by sending a question to the chandler-users mailing list. We really want this move to go smoothly for you and would like to hear your feedback.

Thank you!

– Jared Rhine, OSAF sharing service manager

Chandler 0.7alpha5 has the ability to encrypt the email and sharing account passwords. To encrypt the account passwords, you need to go to File menu and select Protect Passwords… and set a master password. From then on, whenever Chandler needs to use an email or sharing account password, it will ask you for the master password in order to decrypt the protected account password(s). A word of warning though: if you forget the master password you will need to reset all passwords and set new values before email and sharing will work again. By default Chandler remembers the master password for 15 minutes, but you can change the time. The full specification for this feature is described in the Passwords spec.

We’re getting close to our “Preview” release of Chandler and Cosmo. (We’re shooting for April 2007). The Preview release will be the first release that is polished enough for people outside of OSAF to try out and use. We’re very interested in feedback from daily usage to guide us as we move towards a final 1.0 release.

The desktop application provides users with an integrated Dashboard for managing tasks, notes, communications and events and a Calendar for scheduling. Chandler users can share with other desktop users and on the web using our free service (built on our Cosmo server). Collaborators can view or edit calendars and task lists. For more details about what we’ve been up to, check out our recent blog post.

We’ve created a new mailing list for users. A few people are trying out the applications even before Preview, and are giving us great feedback on bugs and problems. We are also using the list to answer questions and take suggestions for future features. We hope to see you on the list!

Our goal for our most recent release, 0.7alpha4, is to give a rough sketch of what Chandler will be by our first Preview release (Spring 2007). This release introduces the Dashboard, which gives users a runway view of all of their information. Users can try creating a simple task list, and can share that list with others just as they can share calendars. Users can also experiment with sending notes, tasks and invitations to others via email.

For further details go to http://chandler.osafoundation.org/newinalpha4.php.

You can download the latest milestone at… http://downloads.osafoundation.org/chandler/milestones/0.7alpha4/

Our goal for our most recent release, 0.7alpha4, is to give a rough sketch of what Chandler will be by our first Preview release (Spring 2007). This release introduces the Dashboard, which gives users a runway view of all of their information. Users can try creating a simple task list, and can share that list with others just as they can share calendars. Users can also experiment with sending notes, tasks and invitations to others via email.

For further details go to http://chandler.osafoundation.org/newinalpha4.php You can download the latest milestone at… http://downloads.osafoundation.org/chandler/milestones/0.7alpha4/

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>

We have just released our latest milestone 0.7alpha3, which builds further on the calendar we released in 0.6 by providing a sneak preview of some of the new features we are implementing for 0.7. With the new features and performance improvements we suggest that 0.6 and 0.6.1 users switch to using the calendar with 0.7alpha3. For further details go to http://chandler.osafoundation.org/newinalpha3.php.

You can download the latest milestone at… http://downloads.osafoundation.org/chandler/milestones/

For data migration instructions see… http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Projects/ChandlerZeroSevenAlpha3DataMigration