The Chandler Project Blog

I’ve just put together a candidate build for Chandler Desktop 0.7.7. Besides some cleanup of the startup/shutdown UI, this is primarily a bugfix release: You can find the full list of 19 bugs addressed here.

This will almost certainly be the last in the 0.7.x series: We’ll be spending the next few weeks to a month fixing bugs, and preparing to release version 1.0.

Updated to add: The build is available for testing here. Also, choosing “Check for Test Updates” from the “Tools” menu should take you to this page.

Updated to add: 0.7.7 was released on June 22, 2008: Get the official release on the chandlerproject home page.

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.

Laszlo Systems announced that they have chosen Chandler Server as the back end for a new calendar application they are deploying by as part of their Webtop suite.

In their recent blog post, Chandler Server came up in the open source credits.

“We liked the fact that we could use the CalDAV standard, and that Cosmo supports publishing a CalDAV collection as a single .ics file that can users can subscribe to via external calendar clients. Also, in evaluating scalability, we found that Cosmo performance outpaced other solutions.”

It’s great to see other people using Chandler Server and getting value out of it. We are happy to have them as an open source partner!

The Chandler Project is pleased to announce the 0.14.2 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 is a bugfix release to update the visual treatment on the login page and add a new widget specific Javascript build.

Chandler Server 0.14.2 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_0.14.2

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

chandler-users@osafoundation.org

We look forward to hearing from you!

While Chandler was originally conceived as a general purpose personal information management tool, we realized early on that sharing and collaboration, particularly small-group collaboration needed to be integral to any effective personal information manager.

It’s an exciting time to be in this area of software development. Software companies are finally turning their attention to small organizations, businesses and households; groups that are less structured than traditional corporate environments.

Chandler falls into this new category of personal and collaboration tools for small, loosely structured workgroups. There are 2 significant ways in which Chandler departs from enterprise-scale collaboration tools:

One. Traditionally, many collaboration tools have been structured around “clients” and projects, which were presumed to have start and end dates and concrete deliverables, that once delivered meant the project was complete. Delivering for each client was assumed to be a relatively “straightforward, process-oriented” affair that could be mapped out in “workflows” that remained constant from one project to the next.

By contrast, Chandler assumes that new projects (or tasks) will continuously emerge from existing projects. Old projects change or become irrelevant before they’re even begun. As a result, “work” becomes a never-ending, ever-changing procession directed towards a higher-level goal. To be sure, deadlines and milestones exist along the way. But they are markers in a continuous progression as opposed to tidy endings to bounded projects.

In short, Chandler is designed for groups that are constantly re-inventing what it is they do and how they do it.

As a result, building and maintaining project and workflow structures for managing and organizing such a constantly changing morass of tasks, dates and unresolved issues just doesn’t seem worth it.

Instead, Chandler is intended for users who are actively looking for something that lets you stay “organized” at their own pace. They specifically don’t want to feel like they’re being pressured to set deadlines they’re not ready to set. They don’t want to be harassed about tasks you entered but no longer need to do. In other words, Chandler users want a “Don’t call me, I’ll call you.” kind of tool.

Two. Traditionally, collaboration tools have focused on coordinating hand-off of information and shared resources (documents, media, etc) so that each member of the team has access to what they need in order to focus on their work.

By contrast, Chandler assumes that ownership of responsibilities is shared and passed from one member of the team to another with relative fluidity.

As a result, Chandler sharing isn’t modeled as a fileshare that gives everyone access to everyone else’s work. Instead, Chandler collaboration assumes that people need help working on the same thing together.

Sharing in Chandler is less about “watching” other people’s task lists and calendars and more about sharing a group collection and calendar where individual tasks are passed around or simply worked on in parallel by multiple people.

This doesn’t mean that “personal” collections can’t and shouldn’t be shared with others. It’s more a matter of “What is Chandler’s special sauce?” when it comes to collaboration.

This fluidy in collaboration also explains why Chandler is first and foremost a personal tool with built-in collaboration as opposed to straight-on groupware.

Our belief is that the line between “my work” and “your work” and “our work” is now sufficiently blurred such that tools that draw a hard line between personal and group task management simply erect unecessary hindrances that break common workflows.

Note: This is yet another way in which Chandler aspires to mimic email. People see email first and foremost as a personal tool. But fundamentally, email is about communicating and working with others. Nevertheless, the collaboration aspect of email is framed as an extension of the personal.)

It’s time to come out with another in our series of monthly-ish Chandler Desktop releases. Chandler Desktop 0.7.6 will contain the following two major features:

1. Separate detail view windows: This has been
   requested fairly often in the past. We’re
   nailing down the final UI for opening a new top-level window for a given item, but otherwise the code is done and has been checked into trunk.
   There will probably be a more detailed post at some point about using this feature: I personally have found it handy to
   use separate windows for items I update regularly but sporadically, like my grocery list.
2. Automatically checking for updates: I’ve added some data on our website to enable Chandler Desktop to check periodically (weekly is the default) for new releases. The app will pop up a dialog that tells you what the new release is, and allows you to click a button to download it in your
   web browser.

Besides this, there are quite a few bugs addressed in 0.7.6. You can find the full list here.

[May 16, 2008] Updated to Add: It’s out now … Download it
here.

[May 16, 2008] Also Added: For more on separate detail views, see
this post.

I was mucking around on wikipedia last night and ended up on the Open Source Applications Foundation entry page. It’s been a while since I looked at this and I was surprised how out of date the information was, particularly since the restructuring in January. Although I love the charming picture of Mitch Kapor, Katie Capps Parlante is now our acting President.

I also looked at the Chandler entry and found it a bit more current. It does show the new logo although the latest version is listed as 0.7.4.1 and not 0.7.5.1. The screenshot could also be updated to show the new simplified UI.

I hesitate to update these myself, as I know that Wikipedia has a NPOV (neutral point of view) policy and I fear being biased. If anyone wants to help us out, updating the entries to reflect the current state of the organization and the project would be much appreciated!

The 0.14.0 release of Chandler Server, pushed live to our open service
Chandler Hub on Friday, boasts few
obviously new features. Instead we’ve taken this release to merge a branch of development
that has been open for several months which moves us to the 1.0 line of the
Dojo Javascript Toolkit. Hopefully Hub users have
already noticed improved load times and a generally snappier interface as a result
of this upgrade, but unsurprisingly the most exciting improvements are in the code.

The first changes I’m excited about are, like our latest release, less wholesale
modifications than improvements and commitments to stable APIs with performance
enhancement sugar to sweeten the deal. Dojo’s internationalization (i18n) and event
APIs have matured to the point where developers can expect to rely on them without
fearing a future change like the one we’ve just experienced. As a result we’ve begun the
process of migrating our custom i18n code to Dojo’s API, away from the custom, backend
dependent code we’ve used in the past. We’ve also started streamlining our use of Dojo’s
topic APIs to make our code easier to read and understand. Both these processes are works in
progress, so keep an eye on this space for more detailed information in the future.

Several components have also seen essentially complete overhauls, most prominently
the XMLHttpRequest wrappers and Dijit, the full featured HTML/CSS UI toolkit built on
Dojo Core. Instead of using dojo.io.bind and passing callback functions,
method, and header information dojo.xhrGet, dojo.xhrPost and a
handful of other methods accept a variety of arguments, make HTTP requests and return
dojo.Deferred objects. This return value, a port of the asynchronous
task management API introduced by Python’s
Twisted networking library, provides an easy way for developers to manage complex
sets of asynchronous actions like server requests. Since our Web UI data APIs already used
dojo.Deferred internally, this change led to a very nice code reduction.

Dojo’s user interface building API, Dijit, has been greatly improved since Dojo 0.4.
In addition to moving to its own namespace as part of Dojo’s overall API flattening,
Dijit is better streamlined, better tested, and easier to use. A number of Chandler Server
UI components have been ported to the Dijit APIs, and are, as a result, better tested,
more modular, and closer to being embeddable outside of our Web UI.

The Dojo team has also been hard at work putting together the next generation of
Javascript tools to support high performance rich applications on top of the
Open Web.
Two of these tools are already finding their way into heavy use within our code base,
and are poised to become critical pieces of our infrastructure over the next year.

The first, dojo.data,
is “uniform data access layer” that allows UI components to be built without worrying
about backend data formats. Our user administration interface has been essentially
completely rewritten, but required almost no new UI code. All we had to do
was implement a dojo.data store on top of the Cosmo Management Protocol
(CMP)
and hook it up to Dojo’s
Grid widget
to get full in-place user field editing, “infinite scrolling” for handling
large numbers of users and a handful of other goodies. While our end-user calendar and
item list UIs have not been moved to this API, the ongoing
web widget project
is being built on a new dojo.data store that we hope to eventually
integrate into our current UI.

The second piece of new functionality that I’m excited about is
dojo.query. This do-it-all CSS query function
is the go-to guy for finding pieces of DOM to manipulate. The beauty of this and other
query functions is that they are based on features most web developers eventually expect
to be supported natively by all major web browsers. By allowing developers to start using
these features now we can build advanced web applications that will get trivially more
performant with time, and motivate browser developers to continue implementing this
critical functionality.

In addition to improving the tools we use to build our Web UI, Dojo’s 1.0 line has
introduced some major infrastructure improvements in the form of a
DOH,
a new Dojo-independent testing harness, and a from-scratch rewrite of the
Dojo build system.
We’ve managed to port all of our tests to DOH by writing some wrappers to avoid
a completely rewrite, which has allowed us to take advantage of the very nice
test harness bundled with Dojo. Nearly as important as this test framework is the build
system that plays a key role in transforming over 1MB of Javascript into a much more
digestible 138K loaded in several different stages. The Dojo 1.0 line makes this process
much cleaner and easy to understand, as well as offering advanced functionality like
layering, which allows us to break our Javascript into large chunks
appropriate to different pieces of our UI.

Dojo has been an integral part of our project to build a new kind of information and
knowledge management ecosystem and we are lucky to be able to rely on a vibrant community
of developers producing a first class piece of software. If you’re interested in digging
deeper and helping us integrate even more of the exciting new functionality provided
in its latest release, Dojo 1.1, please don’t hesitate to ask questions on our
development list,
or via IRC on irc.freenode.net in the #cosmo channel.

So there are lots of releases to talk about in this week’s update.

We rolled out a 0.7.5 version of the Desktop last week which featured a wide variety of bug fixes and UI changes as well as some work to support the security fixes in the new Cosmo release. We did a quick update 0.7.5.1 yesterday to address 2 major bugs that were blocking users from getting started with Chandler. More details are available in the release notes.

0.7.5 Release Notes
0.7.5.1 Release Notes

Cosmo 0.13 was released which includes a major sharing security fix. Upgrading to Cosmo 0.13 requires users to upgrade to Chandler 0.7.5 or 0.7.5.1 to take advantage of the new features so we encourage all Desktop users to upgrade. Randy is moving on to the Cosmo 1.0 bugs in the work queue.

We are progressing well on the Dojo 1.0 work and have another IRC QA session scheduled for 1:00pm today. As always we welcome any testing help from the community. Jeffrey has been away but we will resume work to deploy the Quick Entry Widget when he returns.

Philip is continuing on with his architecture work and working on a proof of concept, “Hello World” for Trellis and SQLAlchemy linkup. He is working on fixing some snags introduced by resent SQLAlchemy changes.

On the marketing front we continue to evangelize Chandler, extract user testimonials, publish blog posts and will be deploying a new landing page and quick start guide soon.

The Chandler Project is pleased to announce the 0.7.5 release of Chandler Desktop!

The Chandler Project is an open source, standards-based information manager designed for personal use and small group collaboration.

The 0.7.5 release of Chandler Desktop simplifies the Chandler UI by changing elements confusing to new users. In particular, multiple toolbar buttons were removed, “tasks” were replaced with “starred items”, the “triage” button was renamed to “clean up”, and the items created when first starting have been made more useful. The sidebar list of collections can now be reordered by dragging them in-place. A variety of build/packaging and platform-specific bugs have also been fixed.

Additionally, Chandler Desktop has updated its sharing protocol to match that of Chandler Server (Cosmo) 0.13. Previously, a user could republish items that had been shared to them read-only to obtain read-write permission to those items. See here and here for more information. People using versions of Chandler Desktop prior to 0.7.5 will not be able to republish items to recent versions of Chandler Server including Chandler Hub.

A list of known issues in this release is at the bottom of this announcement.

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

http://chandlerproject.org/download

Additional information is available from the Chandler Project homepage.

The bugs fixed in this release include:

• #5058 Add the ability to reorder collections in the sidebar
• #7024 Improvements to divider in the sidebar
• #10785 Tab key press doesn’t end lozenge edit on Ubuntu
• #10997 Bad dependency on tools/ dir
• #11013 Plug read-only security hole
• #11238 Reminder popup prevents to use Chandler
• #11239 Using delete via context menu deletes wrong user item – no indication to user
• #11290 Rename Triage button
• #11429 Re-organize the File menu
• #11676 Added a new collection on the hub & Chandler desktop hung
• #11678 make the links in the ‘Tip of the day’ clickable
• #11684 Add “Show Tips” to the Help menu
• #11689 Chandler crashed on linux with X window System error
• #11705 Need to be able to tell if a reflist attribute has been deleted or not
• #11712 Full Name not showing up for sender in email I receive in Apple Mail
• #11729 Generate items from dialog
• #11770 Strip down UI
• #11771 Change task stamp to star stamp
• #11772 Fill-in OOTB items
• #11783 Traceback when making ‘Future’ edit on recurring series
• #11814 Change hint text in quick entry bar to: Create a new note
• #11819 Leopard Desktop releases show “Python” not “Chandler” for name
• #11823 Couldn’t migrate 0.7.3 to 0.7.4 on MacOSX
• #11830 SAST timezone missing
• #11831 German translation’s key-bindings (at least on Mac) are bad
• #11836 Change Copy URLs to Clipboard text to…
• #11838 Language Switch doesn’t work
• #11880 Disallow adding read-only items to other collections
• #11884 Better sharing error messaging
• #11887 Exception changing visible hours in multiweek (month) view
• #11900 Change View>>Triage to View>>Clean up
• #11903 Traceback after upgrading
• #11911 D-click to mark item as 2-triage statuses away
• #11914 Drags to read-only collections succeed
• #11919 Can’t cancel publishing a collection

There are five known issues with this release we’d like to highlight:

• #11878 Can’t put items you received via Email on the Server
• #11921 Read-write access should override read-only access
• #11946 Crash manipulating particular event in Chandler
• #11947 No highlight state in month view
• #11948 sidebar update oddity when creating a collection

This list of known issues includes an application crash that previously didn’t happen when editing an event in a collection that’s not currently selected. All these issues involved sophisticated sharing scenarios (multiple collections with some read-only and others read-write, and sharing items via email) or are UI oddities with simple workarounds.

Thanks for your interest in Chandler Desktop!