Students, if you want to work on an OSAF mentored project, and get paid for your efforts by Google — submit your application here.

The Summer of Code is a program in which Google provides student developers with a $4,500 stipend to create new open source programs or to help currently established projects. Google will be working with a variety of open source, free software and technology related groups to identify and fund up to several hundred projects over a 3 month time span. The inaugural instance of the program, which took place during the summer of 2005, brought together 400 students and 40 mentor organizations from 49 countries.

The program’s goals are to inspire young developers and provide students in Computer Science and related fields the opportunity to do work related to their academic pursuits during the summer, and to support existing open source projects and organizations.

For more information about this program, see the Google Summer of Code 2006 web page.

Today is the first day for students to register for projects via Google’s Summer of Code program. We have a number of ideas for student projects, so please check out our list. If you are interested in something that isn’t listed, you can send a note to any of the OSAF mailing lists.

I’ve started a new personal blog at blog.kapor.com. I will be writing about OSAF, Chandler, and other topics.

John joins OSAF as a Development Manager on the Cosmo and Scooby projects. John joins OSAF after several years at Shutterfly. Read more about John on our people page.

I’m approaching my first year anniversary at OSAF and I’m still amazed at how the Open Source process works. I’m saying “process” here because there’s more to Open Source than just code: specs, ideas and sheer energy, all of these are part and parcel of Open Source.

This point was recently driven home (for me at least) last week when I received an email from Bill Bumgarner himself (the PyObjC maintainer) kindly pointing to some inaccuracies in a doc I wrote some months ago.

Now, it’s a pretty simple and very Chandler centric doc and I was quite surprised to see how much exposure it got. In any other company, such a doc would have been maintained privately in some obscure project and no one outside the project, not even other people at the company, would have commented on it but since I posted it publicly (as everything we do at OSAF), I regularly receive questions and comments from people who read it. Most of them are folks who, like us, are developing an application and are shopping around for a cross platform UI framework. Some of those emails are from people like Bill who are commenting the document and, in the process make it better while teaching me a couple of things I didn’t know.

So here you see the Open Source process in all of its glory: you post something you thought very narrow in scope, it gets picked, you get feedback and comments from people interested in the same subject, you learn something and everyone has a better doc as a result. Iterate often and you get something actually useful.

I’m telling you: I’m glad I joined OSAF last year, really, I haven’t learnt as much since college. Thanks to all for your comments.

P.S.:

• I posted an updated framework doc but remember that this is a very centric Chandler view of the problem
• David wrote a more interesting doc on how to evaluate application frameworks that you should read if you are in the business of shopping around for one.
• There are other people commenting on cross platform frameworks that might be more adequate for your project. Jon Hoyle has a very interesting one for instance, commenting on Qt and wxWidgets from a Mac perspective. There are certainly others.

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.

OSAF is going to have a slightly larger than normal presence at PyCon this year. Three members of the OSAF staff are giving presentations

1. Grant Baiilie is talking about Zanshin, our CalDAV client library.
2. Jeffrey Harris is talking about VObject, a library for working with vCalendar, iCalendar, and vCard files.
3. Brian Kirsch is talking about how to internationalize a Python application, using Chandler as an example, and touching on the use of PyICU.

Please say hi if you are around!

OSAF is looking for interns in the following areas:

• Software Engineer Intern - Chandler project
• Software Engineer Intern- Cosmo or Scooby project
• QA Engineer Intern
• IT Sysadmin Intern

For more information visit our employment page.

Today OSAF released Chandler 0.6.1, an update to its “experimentally usable” calendar. This release fixes a number of bugs that prevented some of our users from downloading and experimenting with the application. The fixes addressed bugs preventing certain calendars from being imported, some sharing errors, and addressing a number of items that support the developer community. A more comprehensive summary and be found in the 0.6.1 Fixed Bugs wiki page.