Windows users who upgraded to version 1.0-rc1 may have run into the following error message when launching Chandler:

“Another Chandler is already running off the same data repository.”

Thanks to reports from users, we’ve now fixed the problem in version 1.0-rc2.

If you download and run the new rc2 version, Chandler should launch and load your data without any problems. However, if you do run into any issues, please let us know at chandler-users@osafoundation.org!

In addition, we have addressed the following three bugs reported by users:

• 12256 Overzealous url detection
• 12262 Outlook doesn’t like empty body for multipart/alternative
• 12276 Changing date and day of custom weekly event results in item’s disappearance

To download the new release, either use the “Check for Updates” feature (via the File >> Check for Updates >> Now menu item), or visit the download page

Thanks to all for your patience in helping us test!

The Chandler Team

One of Chandler’s appeals for me is the ability to manage lots of different ideas, but only focus on a few at a time. The way focus works in Chandler is that items are “triaged” to NOW, LATER, or DONE.

DONE is just like filing an email. NOW is like leaving the email in my inbox. The big enhancement, for me, is LATER.

With the LATER section, you can mark a message as important to pay attention to, but not right now. This risks becoming a gargantuan pit of “someday, maybe” items, though, so you can also assign an alarm, and that item will pop back to NOW in the future.

Now I can choose just a few things to keep in my NOW section, and collapse the LATER and DONE sections so they don’t distract me.

One big problem with the LATER section, until recently, was that it was sorted pretty arbitrarily. I have dozens of LATER items. Birthdays, events months from now, reminders to do something next month, and more. What I (and most users, from what we’ve heard on our mailing lists) want is for the LATER section to sort according to when an item will become NOW again.

I’m happy to announce that in our latest release (1.0rc1), the LATER section sorts appropriately! For all you non-Chandler users reading this, that may not seem like a big deal. But it has a surprisingly big impact on my use of Chandler.

When LATER sorted arbitrarily, I spent a lot of my time going and looking at my calendar to remind myself if I had upcoming events. Really, I don’t have enough events to want a calendar view very often. Mostly, I just want to know what’s coming soon. Now the LATER section gives me that.

I used to not bother assigning alarms to events. I’m not sure why, it just felt like too much effort for not enough payoff. Being able to see a prioritized-by-date list of LATER items pushes the effort-to-payoff ratio to a point where I’m always assigning alarms to anything I don’t want to think about right now. As a result, my NOW section is much more manageable and I’m calmer about what I need to be thinking about.

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.