Lifehacker: Previewing Chandler, The PIM for the People

A month back, we were mentioned on the lifehacker blog as “the PIM for the People”.

What have we done to deserve such a title? Gina Trapani, the blog editor picked out this phrase from our vision statement:

“Our goal is to serve the way people actually work, independently and together, particularly in small groups, a market segment we believe is underserved. Our belief is that personal and collaborative information work is by nature iterative and that the existing binary Done/Not-Done, Read/Unread, Flagged/Unflagged paradigm in productivity software poorly accommodates the reality of how people work.”

I’m glad that this resonated with her. It’s something we should certainly build on and refine.

On the other hand, she also said: “As for the preview release, well, it has some ways to go” and “it’s not stable software ready for primetime”. She cited inability to sync completely with Gmail as her personal blocker. (She’s not the first to have this reaction.)

We’re certainly taking these kinds of concerns seriously. We’ve found that most people who show up on the users list and are using Chandler for tasks and calendaring find the desktop sufficiently stable to meet their needs. However, if you’re running on an older machine (e.g. PPC Mac) or if you’re hoping to get all your email into Chandler, the app might feel unstable.

But she did follow up with: “…the Chandler preview IS an exciting tease at a unified inbox/calendar/task list that keeps all your stuff in one place while offering decentralized sharing capabilities.”

She also sees us as potentially “delivering users from the evil of Microsoft Outlook and Exchange server”.

The lifehacker post illustrates both what’s best and worst about our efforts thus far to communicate to a wider audience about what we are and what we hope to become. Questions we need to answer in the coming months include:

1. Is it really a given that people won’t use Chandler until it replaces their email client? The response to What is Chandler supposed to be for, anyway? shows signs that with the right messaging and relatively lightweight feature improvements, we could convince people to use Chandler as an add-on to their existing email client.

2. There is something appealing about Chandler as an open source project and Chandler as an attempt to up-end existing information management paradigms. It would be interesting to better understand: What in the product itself gives people a sense that we’re living up to our promise? Or is it just our verbiage that’s convincing?

3. What about Chandler as Outlook/Exchange killer? Do we need to have that to keep people interested? We try to repudiate it wherever we can, but it’s a label that’s stuck. How do we set expectations correctly without presenting it as a lack, deficiency?

Robert Scoble interviewed us for 51 minutes. Still, I realized that there were significant things I had left out while caught in the headlights of the camera.

Here’s a brief description of some of the neat features in the Mini-Calendar and Preview Pane on Chandler Desktop.

More egregiously however, when showing the Triage Table, I failed to showcase the considerable ‘Brain’ that decides what metadata to show when for each item of information.

The idea of having a heterogeneous view of data is not new. In the ‘real’ world, our ‘collections’ are more often heterogeneous than not. Just open up your desk drawer and take a look.

It’s a simple, accessible idea until you try to normalize that data by cramming it into a table where every row of information needs to conform to the same 5 columns of attributes.

How do you fit

• Notes that have creators and editors and created on and last edited dates; in the same table as
• Messages that have a sender, recipients, and date sent;
• Tasks that have owners, reminder dates and due dates; with
• Events that have organizers, invitees and start dates and end dates.

The few places I’ve seen this done, normalization was achieved by whittling down what’s displayed to the lowest common denominator: Titles and Date Last Edited. This approach generally yields an information-poor display of data that is not very useful.

We achieved normalization without losing data by adding a layer of abstraction.

We grouped all of the ‘Who’ attributes into a singled column

• Created / Edited by
• To / From / Updated by

and all of the ‘When’ (Date) attributes into a single column:

• Created /Edited on
• Sent / Received on
• Starts on
• Remind on

The problem is, most Chandler items have all of these attributes so we needed a way to decide which attribute to show under what circumstances. This is a tricky path to negotiate and we’re continually refining our heuristics.

What is ‘most important’ is subjective, but there are a few rules that we believe hit a fair majority of use cases:

• Message items always display From/To in the Who column depending on whether the message is Inbound or Outbound.
• The Who column always displays ‘Edited by’ when an item has been modified by a fellow subscriber.
• Depending on ‘the current time’ we figure out the ‘Next Important Date’ is to display in the Date column. For example, event dates usually trump all other dates, but if an event has past but there’s still an alarm set for next Tuesday, we display the alarm date.

Either way, the bet we’re making is that it’s better to display something even if it’s the wrong thing some of the time than to display nothing at all.

In the past few days we’ve gotten some kind mentions on BoingBoing and ArsTechnica. It’s great to see that people are interested in what we we are doing.

Unfortunately, there are a few factual errors in both articles. I’m sure that this is partially due to the long history of Chandler, and also to some of the very early articles about the project. The Chandler project has attracted a lot of attention, but a lot of things have changed over the course of the project.

Probably the largest error has to do with the role of Andy Hertzfeld. Andy was one of the original members of the Chandler team, and was one of the contributors to Vista, but he hasn’t been active on the Chandler project for a few years. Chandler as you see it is very different from Vista.

The world is looking for a competitor for Exchange, or so it seems, and that rubs off on us. Chandler didn’t come in to being with the purpose of competing with Exchange. It came into being because Mitch wanted a solution for small groups of people. Our initial target audience for Chandler is small workgroups. After that, our goal is supporting university scale usage.

There also seem to be some misconceptions about the size of the OSAF staff. Today there are 23 people on the Chandler development team at OSAF, including a full time UI designer, a QA person, and some managers. In addition, there are 5 people working on server related projects: Cosmo - a CalDAV sharing server, and Scooby, a web based calendar access application.

The current version of Chandler, 0.6 is focused on producing a usable calendar. Most of the work went into the calendar and not very much went into e-mail. The work that we’ve done so far is mostly under the hood. There’s support for IMAP and SMTP, which will work with Internet standard e-mail, so it’s not limited to a Chandler workgroup. We have yet more protocol level work to do, and there’s lots of UI work that remains to be done.

There was one important message that didn’t come across in either posting. We are looking for participation in the project. That means feedback on features, bug reports, bug fixes, other contributions, documentation, and so on. Please come visit us on one of the mailing lists, or on IRC.

The March/April issue of IEEE Internet Computing has a great article written by Lisa Dusseault, OSAF’s standards architect and author of the IETF CalDAV draft, and Jim Whitehead, Assistant Professor, University of California, Santa Cruz, founder and former chair of the IETF WebDAV working group. This article is a terrific overview and technical introduction to the new standard that OSAF is using for sharing calendars in Chandler. Click here to view the article. Read the rest of this entry »

Mitch Kapor is featured in some recent articles discussing open source developments in general and our Chandler project in particular.

To see the references and links back to the original articles go to our OSAF Press Room page.

The current issue of Hemispheres, United Airlines’ inflight magazine has a good article on OSAF and Chandler by Tom Mueller. In case you were not planning on taking a United flight this month you can catch the article online at http://www.hemispheresmagazine.com/cyber/desktop.html

Two articles have been just published about OSAF’s Chandler project.

One is a sidebar in the most recent issue of Wired Magazine entitled “Reinventing Your Inbox: Mitch Kapor brings open source to the masses.”, by Dan Gillmor.

The other is the top story in the November issue of MIT Technology Review, “Trash Your Desktop: Mitch Kapor’s new, more intuitive computer interface puts all the information we need to manage our digital lives at our fingertips, no matter what form it’s in.”, by Michael Fitzgerald. You can also see this article as a pdf file with fancier formatting and photos.

To help you keep track of changes at OSAF, our website will now provide an RSS feed. If you have an RSS reader you can subscribe to the OSAF RSS feed at: www.osafoundation.org/rss/2.0/” width=”36″ height=”14″ border=”0″ />