The Chandler Project Blog

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

Mitchell Baker started a conversation about the future of email at Mozilla, looking for people to participate in “a new vision of mail”. OSAF should be engaging in this conversation, looking for ways to collaborate with Mozilla.

We’ve been looking at email as an important part of the Chandler project. Our approach has been to design applications around user problems and goals, in particular for informal groups working together. Our starting point was the observation that people use their Inbox as their task list. Another observation: calendaring is fundamental to task management; integration of messaging with calendaring makes a lot of sense with user workflows. We think that people will benefit from integrating email, tasks, calendar, contacts and other related information in one application, instead of having to do the work of patching together information across software tools, protocols and data formats. We’ve observed people collaborating on shared problems with email; we think there are huge gains to be made by converging personal communication and group collaboration. Email protocols are not the only route for communication; social networking and other messaging paradigms are other important areas to explore.

The Chandler team is currently working on a Preview release expected by the end of August: a usable version of the desktop application, rich web application, and server. We’ll also launch our free hosted service, Chandler Hub (an instance of Chandler Server).

Chandler Desktop will not be a full email client in the Preview release, but great email support is important to our full vision. Our research shows that many people sit in their email client all day as they try and manage their personal information and work on projects with others. Chandler uses email protocols for “sharing” items (calendar events, notes, tasks). It also has enough basic email functionality to allow users to get email into Chandler to manage a task list and calendar, but as a complement to an email client. Filling out Chandler to be a full email client is one of our options for a 1.0 release.

If you want more information about Chandler ideas, you can read the latest draft of our vision document or explore our wiki. A user guide and screencasts will be showing up as well. You can also experience Chandler in action by downloading the desktop, server, and/or creating a free account on Chandler Hub. Even though we haven’t released Preview yet, the recent desktop checkpoints are usable (modulo a few bugs) as is the previous release of the server (it doesn’t have the full Preview feature set). We use it internally to share group task lists and manage an office calendar.

The Chandler team is focused on getting our Preview release out, so we’re pretty busy through August. We anticipate getting interesting feedback from Preview and we’re going to let that guide our next steps.

I’m not yet sure where a collaboration with Mozilla would lead or what it would mean, but I think we’re looking at a similar problem space and it makes sense to see if we can forge a common path and combine resources. We offer a perspective on the problem, a server and a desktop application, and a team of people who are excited about doing creative things with personal information management (including email). Once we have Preview out, I intend for OSAF to participate actively in the conversation about email futures.

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.

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

We’re please to announce the 0.6.1 update of Chandler Server (Cosmo)!

Chandler Server is a database, server, and web UI for storing and managing personal information such as events and tasks. It implements standards such as CalDAV, WebDAV, Atom, and Atom Publishing Protocol.

Chandler Server 0.6.1 is currently available for download at: .

This release focuses on the server side communication between Chandler Desktop and the Chandler Server. We have created a new HTTP-based synchronization protocol,
Morse Code , which significantly decrease the time it takes to subscribe to and synchronize collections between the desktop and server.

Find download information, installation instructions and release notes at: .

Send us feedback at:chandler-users@osafoundation.org

We look forward to hearing from you!!

-Priscilla

The OSAF team has been busily focusing on our “Preview” releases — functional products that are interesting enough for people to try out and give us meaningful feedback. (”Preview” will not be 1.0 — more like a usable public beta). Our original goal was to have these releases ready this month — we’ve adjusted our schedule to June. The countdown to Preview is tracked on our wiki.

Help us!

If you are adventurous and want to help out the project, we’d love to have people trying out the desktop application and the web application even before we get to Preview. Find bugs and help us make it better! Join the users list, download the latest checkpoint of the desktop application, or check out the web application.

Branding

Chandler was originally a code name for the desktop application. After careful consideration, we decided to use the name for the whole group of products (the desktop application, the online service and the server that runs the service). We’ve chosen a domain name (chandlerproject.org), and we’re working on a new logo. We’re also cleaning up our wiki and our websites as we near Preview. We discuss this work on the general mailing list.

Chandler Desktop

The desktop project hit a feature complete milestone on April 9. New features include recurrence and auto-triage of items in the dashboard, editing and updating items via email, Chandler IMAP folders, context menus, a new sharing format, conflict management, and data migration features. The team is working on performance now, and will spend many weeks after that fixing bugs.

Chandler Server (Cosmo)

“Chandler Server” is our new name for Cosmo. The 0.6 release of Chandler server was described in an earlier post. The server team is currently wrapping up the 0.6.1 release, which implements a new sharing format for data exchange with the desktop application. The team has also started on the 0.7 release, which will allow users to view and edit shared tasks and events in a table.

Chandler Hub (osaf.us)

“Chandler Hub” is our new name for the online service hosted by OSAF, running Chandler server. The service is currently running the 0.6 version of the server. We plan on moving to 0.6.1 in a few weeks, and upgrading to 0.7 in June. Once we’re ready to “Launch” Preview, we’ll use our new domain name (chandlerproject.org).

We are very happy to have the following students working on projects this summer:

Tim Pokorny will be working with Bobby Rullo on “Comet Event Notification for Cosmo UI”

Phil Jones will be working with Jeffrey Harris on “Natural Language Processing with Chandler”

Vera Sheinman will be working with Jeffrey Harris on “Progress Reports Management”

More information on the projects is available here <http://code.google.com/soc/osaf/about.html>

Welcome!

We are pleased that OSAF will again be participating in Google’s Summer of Code program in 2007. We had a very positive experience with Summer of Code last year, and hope that we’ll have an even better experience this year.

This year, we have project opportunities on the Chandler, Cosmo, and the Windmill projects. You can see our list of projects here, or propose your own project related to Chandler, Cosmo, or Windmill.

If you are a student and interested in applying to the Google Summer of Code program, you can use Google’s web application to apply.

We’re please to announce our first experimentally usable release of Cosmo! Cosmo 0.6 is currently available for use or for download.

What’s new in Cosmo 0.6:

• Event editing on shared calendars without an account
• Better interoperability with other calendar applications ie. iCal, Sunbird, etc.
• Display of time zones on calendar events
• Notification of an updated event on a shared calendar
• New improvement to the Administrator UI
• Tons of bug fixes!

Find download information, installation instructions and release notes at: http://cosmo.osafoundation.org.

OSAF continues to work towards the Preview release of our products and services currently scheduled for Spring 2007. Refer to the Preview Countdown Page to keep track of our progress.

If you are already experimentally using Chandler and would like to try Cosmo, you may need to make changes to your configuration, please refer to Jared’s instructions on the general mailing list.

Please keep in mind we’re still working out the kinks in 0.6, so feel free to
send us feedback. We look forward to hearing from you!!

-Cosmo Team