There have been a number of significant, new features since the 0.7.7 release including:

• bug 7612 Clickable URLs in the Notes field
• bug 8087 Support for more recurrence rules (e.g. 3rd Wednesday of every month, MTTh weekly, etc)
• bug 12234 Performance improvement: Replace weekly “purge” with “export/reload”. (Many users reported experiencing noticeable performance boosts when upgrading, which is when you typically export and reload your data.)
• bug 11774 The LATER section in the Triage List view now sorts correctly! Displaying events and reminders “in chronological order”. Items without event or custom alarms dates appear at the bottom of the LATER section.
• bug 12246 Alarms are overriding the event date in the Triage List date column.

Here is the complete list of 1.0-rc1 features and bug fixes.

So please help us by upgrading to version 1.0-rc1 and as usual, send reports of any issues you find to the chandler-users list or bugzilla. To upgrade, you can either Check for updates in Chandler, or visit the downloads page.

The thread, originally begun with the title: “Chandler maturing as an Outlook alternative” has grown into a more general discussion of sustainability and open source projects and in particular, our own plans for building a volunteer development community.

Much of the conversation has revolved around how we maintain a user-centered focus as a project as we work to attract volunteer developers. (A challenge all consumer-facing open source projects face.)

Don C in particular has had some useful words of advice based on his experience on The Sahana Project.

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.

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.

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!

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!

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.)

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 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 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.