OSCON wrapups from various OSAF folks have started to appear:

• Adam Christian
• Ted Leung
• Brian Moseley
• Mikeal Rogers
• Matthew Eernisse

Update: added reports from Mikeal Rogers and Matthew Eernisse

Well I just got back from EuroPython 2007 held in Vilnius, Lithuania.

EuroPython was definitely smaller than our American Pycon counterpart and the diversity of talks more limited.

My favorite talk was on Streaming with Python, Twisted, and GStreamer.

I particularly enjoyed meeting developers on that side of the hemisphere who don’t normal make it to the American conferences. Overall, EuroPython had a very intimate feel.

On July 10th, I gave a lightening talk on Chandler which went very well.

I was trying to figure out how to capture all the functionality of Chandler in 5 minutes or less of speech time. I decided to run our Functional Test Framework while describing the different features Chandler has as the suite was creating new collections, new items, stamping, configuring accounts, sending email, publishing collections, and subscribing to collections. All in all I was able to show a large amount of Chandler functionality this way in under 3 minutes.

I then quit the tests and switch to a running version of Chandler spending the last two minutes demonstrating how internationalization and the plug-in framework work in Chandler. Specifically, I did an Amazon search for Scott Rosenberg and showed the collection results as well as an EVDB search for Opera in San Francisco.

I got a very good reception from the audience. As many people had not been following Chandler in a while they were surprised at how much recent progress had been made.

On July 11th, I gave my Internationalizing in Python: Chandler a case study presentation. It went very well also. There was strong turn out and I think may people were surprised out how hard it is to actually Internationalize / localize an application in Python.

In addition to showing slides I gave code examples of EggTranslations, PyICU, and how to create localization eggs using the Chandler tools.

You can view photos from the conference as well as access my presentation slides at:

http://people.osafoundation.org/bkirsch/europython/

On July 12th and 13th I hosted two days of Sprints on localizing Chandler.

I must say I learned a great deal. One thing that I had not considered is that localizers also make a very good focus group on Chandler usability. Since none of the translators had worked in depth with Chandler before, it was not only an exercise in how easy is the application to localize but also how easy is it for someone to start Chandler and grasp the concepts the application offers.

There were many issued raised at the Sprint including bugs in the Chandler code that are hindering a complete localization, better tools that need to be provided for localization, and ways that we need to better organize our strings in code to create a usable Chandler.pot for translators to work with.

I would classify those two days as providing the last few missing pieces regarding Chandler’s localization strategy.

I am excited to get started on providing the user community with the ability to localize Chandler in our 0.7.1 release which will follow Preview.

I have summarized the entire experience of the Sprints and next steps for Chandler i18n / l10n as well as included a link to the Swedish translation egg created during the Sprints here:

http://people.osafoundation.org/bkirsch/postsprint/

-Brian Kirsch

OSCON is next week in Portland and a number of folks from the Chandler project will be there.

Wednesday morning, Ted Leung and Mimi Yin will be giving a presentation “Open Design, Not by Committee”, about our experiences incorporating designers into an open source development process.

Katie Parlante will be giving a Chandler project update during the “State of Lightning Talks” on Thursday morning

Also on Thursday morning, Mikeal Rogers and Adam Christian will be talking about Windmill, the tool that we use to test the AJAX based user interface for Chandler Server (Cosmo).

There will also be a Chandler BOF on Thursday night, so please come by and say “Hi”. Since the Preview release is just around the corner, now would be a great time to check in and find out what’s been happening.

Mimi Yin is the interaction designer for OSAF where she designs the visual interface for Chandler. In March she will be participating in three different forums talking about issues that drive user interface design for Chandler.

9 March 2006, O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, San Diego., Personal Information Architecture and Chandler.

14 March 2006, The San Francisco Bay Area Chapter of ACM SIGCHI 7:30-9:30 pm. Getting Things Done: Technology and Practice.

27 March 2006, 7th Information Architecture Summit, Vancouver, BC., Tagging and Beyond: Personal, Social and Collaborative Information Architecture

OSAF is going to have a slightly larger than normal presence at Pycon this year (24-26 February 2006 in Addison, Texas near Dallas). Three members of the OSAF staff are giving presentations. For details see the blog entry OSAF at Pycon.

A few weeks ago, we had some sprints for the OSAF staff. These were kind of blue sky sprints and people worked on pretty much whatever they felt like (if you are looking for cool project ideas related to Chandler, there are a bunch of those there as well).

Morgen had worked up a simple XML-RPC server which allowed him to build an OS X Dashboard widget that could get information out of Chandler. That, discussions we’ve had about building a simple command line interface into Chandler, and the KGTD Quicksilver Action were the inspiration for a quick hack.

The KGTD Quicksilver action allows you to use Quicksilver’s text entry facilities to dump ideas or reminders or whatever into KGTD right from Quicksilver. It provides a quick, unobtrusive mechanism for collecting stuff that you need to get out of your head and into your Getting Things Done (GTD) system.

What I did was to do a similar thing, but instead of sending the text to KGTD, I send the text to Chandler via XML-RPC. And instead of sending just a piece of text, I implemented a very stupid command line interface to Chandler. The XML-RPC servlet and the command line processor are now checked into Chandler’s subversion repository, and the QuickSilver AppleScript is checked into my OSAF sandbox: http://svn.osafoundation.org/sandbox/twl/applescripts/ToChandler.scpt. The script ended up being very simple, because AppleScript has built in support for XML-RPC handling. In fact, the code is so short, that I’ll just include it here, too.

-- Invoke applescript with text
-- 1. Activate QuickSilver and select this script.

– 2. Tab to the next and select Process Text..
– 3. Tab to the final pane and enter the command line text


using terms from application “Quicksilver”
    on process text ThisClipping
        tell application “http://localhost:1888/xmlrpc”
            set returnValue to call xmlrpc {method name:”commandline”, parameters:ThisClipping}
        end tell
    end process text
end using terms from

This is mostly a cool developer hack at the moment, but it gives you a taste of things you could do to integrate better with the native platform, as well as demonstrating the power of having some server functionality built into a desktop application. Of course, in an ideal OS X world, we’d have an AppleScript dictionary for Chandler and just use AppleScript (instead of XML-RPC) to do all this. But that’s probably a topic for another post.

Earlier this week I represented OSAF at the 4th CalConnect Interop. This entailed spending a day and half in a room with a bunch of other calendaring vendors, trying to make sure that our software works with theirs.

Most of the work I did involved CalDAV client-server testing. Besides OSAF’s own Cosmo, there were servers from Novell, RPI and Oracle to test against. It turns out that these servers work sufficiently differently from ours that they exposed interesting and useful bugs in our CalDAV client implementation.

Two other CalDAV clients besides Chandler were represented: Mozilla’s Sunbird client, and Evolution (with CalDAV plugin). Brian Moseley had set up a machine at OSAF where he could debug a test server, and was available on IRC to help diagnose problems. Both Evolution and Sunbird use a different method of downloading events from a CalDAV server than Chandler, so Brian (with the help of Bobby Rullo) was able to chase down a couple of good bugs.

In the remaining time, I was able to squeeze in some testing of interoperability of ICalendar (.ics) files with other vendors, including Novell Groupwise, EVDB and Trumba. This, too, turned up a couple of interesting bugs.

All in all, it was very helpful to devote some time to interoperability, especially in an environment where you can discuss issues with other developers, and, in some cases, resolve or work around them. Thanks to CalConnect for organising, and to Novell for hosting us in their lovely Executive Briefing suite.

Last week I was at Educause for a couple days, part of a panel o CalDAV implementors. I demonstrated Chandler, and indirectly Cosmo too, to show the university IT audience that CalDAV is real and gaining adoption. François Perrault of Oracle did the first demo, showing Outlook with Oracle’s connected installed client-side, putting a calendar onto the Oracle server (not using CalDAV). But then he showed Lightning could pull down that calendar and view it using CalDAV, and add/change events.

For my part of the demo, I brought up Chandler (m6) with a calendar that had previously been pulled from a Cosmo (0.2.1) server and explained this. Then I subscribed to François’s calendar on an Oracle server, and it showed up in a different colour. Finally I subscribed to a third calendar on an RPI version of UW Calendar, adding a third set of events displaying along with the first two calendars. Except for a mysterious glitch where subscribing to the Oracle calendar didn’t work the first or second attempt but did work on the third attempt, it all went rather well.

I attended the FLOSS Extreme Usability Spring II in San Francisco last week.

In the words of the event organizers Blue Oxen and Aspiration:

“Extreme usability is a methodology that incorporates usability in a highly iterative and agile development process and that partners usability practitioners with programmers and users as co-designers and co-developers.”

Unfortunately, we were unable to take Chandler there as a project, but I had a great time working with the folks from CivicCRM. The event lived up to it’s name and was an extremely intense 3 days of whirlwind usability.

I’ve written up a short-ish report of the what our group accomplished at the sprint and the process we “invented” along the way.

The write-up in turn generated some thoughts as to the nature of usability and design, both in general and in practice. In particular, it got me thinking about how the vague and intangible nature of designing software for human beings is better suited to Extremely Rapid and Extremely Iterative design methods than the Somewhat Rapid and Somewhat Iterative approach that I’m used to.

Personal take on What is Extreme Usability?

Broader implications on What is Usability?

I also realized that while here at OSAF, we are priveleged to have such a close and ongoing working relationship between Development and Design, there are still many lessons to be learned about how to make that relationship even better.

I’m looking forward to trying out some of the techniques we experimented with at the sprint, in-house. Perhaps to iron out some of the existing design issues we have as well as to generate new ideas for areas of the UI that are still murky at best. I’d like to gain a better understanding of where Extreme Usability works very well and where it works, not so well.

I thought I had better post my belated impressions of OSCON 2005 soon or I might as well wait until next year.

This was my first trip OSCON and in addition to simply attending, I was pleased to be able to participate in the CALDAV panel. It was very well attended, with standing-room only, demonstrating that there is clearly a great deal of interest around calendaring and interoperability. Due to some technical difficulties, I was the only one able to get a demo up and running and showed off a few sharing scenarios between Chandler and Cosmo which seemed to generate some buzz from the audience. The BOF immediately afterwards meant more time for Q&A where people asked some tough questions about scheduling. I realized how wide reaching calendaring pain goes when one individual spoke up about the specific challenges of managing calendars for booking a concert venue. The only other related session, was a discussion on the complexity of calendar data interchange, the various formats and clients available. Chandler made the list and did pretty well in a comparison of different clients handling of all day events.

In addition to attending the Chandler presentations and BOFs I also registered for the Open Source Business Review which was a special track of panels geared towards the needs of enterprise businesses. Some of these sessions were more informative/relevant than others. In general, I tried to attend a variety of sessions that I thought would be interesting. I was a bit disappointed that there weren’t more sessions geared towards community building or strategies for product adoption.

A few interesting talks worth noting…

Computational Origami by Robert Lang was extremely fascinating. In addition to impressing us with a detailed cuckoo clock made out of a single sheet of paper, he discussed the math and algorithms behind origami and how those can be applied to solve real engineering problems.

Saul Griffith, one of the keynotes, spoke about Howtoons, one-page cartoons showing kids how to build things with ordinary stuff (Turkey Baster Flute, Shockwave Air Cannon). It was an interesting perspective on how we can expose the younger generation to open-source philosophies and collaboration.

Women in Open Source was a also a great panel discussion. I was surprised to learn that less than 2% of the open source community is female which is significantly less than for closed source development. Based on the animated discussion as well as attendance, I suspect this will be a topic covered at future conferences.

Overall, it was educational, fun and I came away with a much better sense of the wide variety of open source projects that are in the works.