Chandler consists of a desktop application and Chandler Hub, a free sharing service and web application. You can also download and run your own Chandler Server.

Chandler is open source and standards-based.

What’s different about Chandler?

Chandler aims to provide a more integrated approach to managing information with:

• A Quick Entry Bar to enter everything from ideas to reminders and appointments.
• NOW-LATER-DONE Triage List to collect, process and track everything from deadlines and meetings to drafts and ideas.
• Tickler Alarms to auto-re-focus deferred (LATER) items to NOW
• An integrated, full-featured calendar designed for tracking meetings and events and tasks and deadlines.
• Back-up and Sharing: Manage personal and shared lists and calendars side-by-side. Back-up to the Chandler Hub sharing service, sync with other calendar apps and services, and sync your data across multiple computers and access it from the web.
• Lightweight integration with Email.

You can download Chandler Desktop, sign up for a free Chandler Hub account and get a tour of the product. Check out the source. And get involved in the project as we set our sights on growing our community. And send your feedback and questions to: chandler-users@osafoundation.org or chat with us on IRC!

We look forward to hearing from you!
The Chandler Team

What’s changed since Preview?

Chandler Desktop

• simpler interface
• streamlined upgrade experience
• streamlined set up for backup and sharing
• ability to re-order collections in the left-hand sidebar
• detachable detail view

Plus, 11th hour volunteer contributions for:

• clickable links in the notes field
• custom recurrence rules

Chandler Hub/Server

• streamlined sign-up experience
• better experience for subscribing with other apps and services (Apple iCal, Google)
• ability to invite others to share
  
  
• calendar overlays
• streamlined detail view
  
  
• new iGoogle Quick Entry widget that can also work on Linux desktop
• ability to sync all Chandler data (not just events) with Apple iCal, Lightning…
  
  
• upgraded web interface to Dojo 1.0.2
• back-end support for importing .ics calendar files
• back-end support for notifications
• back-end support for managing collections through the feed service.

Significant Bug Fixes

Chandler Desktop

• recurring events keep popping to NOW, marked as Unread
• sort LATER section chronologically

Chandler Hub/Server

• patched read-write sharing security issue
• make Triage Status sort consistent with Desktop
• occurrences more than a month in the future don’t show up in the Triage List

Complete lists of feature work and bug fixes for Desktop and Server.

New and improved documentation:

• New website: chandlerproject.org
• New Product Tour with a new demos
• Gallery of User Stories
• New Get Started Guide
• Updated documentation for Chandler Server

The solution to this problem, the collection sharing dialog you can find on Chandler Hub today, solves this problem and more. Any time you’d like to share your Chandler Hub data with other people or even just other applications you use, this starting point will make everything else easier.

Today we’ll two follow users, Adam and Zed, as they run through a sharing worflow we think you’ll find useful.

Invite Collaborators

Adam and Zed are coaching their sons’ soccer team, the Beagles. Adam has been using Chandler at work, and creates a new collection to help with the mountain of organization that will need to take place. He has published this collection to http://hub.chandlerproject.org and would like Zed to give him some feedback on a proposed practice schedule.

After logging into the Hub Web UI, Adam clicks on the pulldown arrow next to “Soccer” to bring up the collection sharing dialog.

He then clicks on the “invite” button to generate two sharing links.

Finally, he right clicks on the “View and Edit” sharing link and selects Send link…. He could also just copy the link location and paste it manually into the email or instant message program of his choice.

When Zed gets the link he can paste it into his favorite web browser and instantly review and edit Adam’s practice schedule. What’s more, if he wants to start using the Chandler Desktop client, he can use this link to subscribe to this collection there.

Collaborate with iCal

Zed’s not ready to take the Chandler Desktop plunge. It’s not that he doesn’t like Chandler, but he’s been a die-hard Apple iCal fan for years. Fortunately, iCal and Chandler work great together. Once Zed pastes the link he received from Adam into his web browser, he’s excited to see a big green button on the left side of the screen labeled “Apple iCal, Google.” He clicks it and follows the instructions in the dialog that appears to add this collection to iCal. Unfortunately, due to underlying technical restrictions he won’t be able to edit the collection or add new events from iCal. Fortunately, Zed has bookmarked the link Adam sent him, and can do all the editing he needs there.

Sky’s the Limit

Hub interoperability doesn’t end with support for Apple iCal. Several other clients, including the Lightning Calendaring Extension for Mozilla Thunderbird, have built in support for CalDAV, a calendar sharing standard. Hundreds of feed readers, usually used for keeping track of blogs and news, can subscribe to the Atom based collection feeds provided by Chandler Hub. Instructions for each of these methods can be found in the collection sharing dialog and the Chandler Project wiki.

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

David Read responded that he was using Chandler in exactly that way:

Liz,

My family uses Chandler just the way you are describing. Each individual has a calendar and Chandler makes it easy to view each as part of a unified schedule.

The big win for me is that whether I’m home, at work or out of town, I have a way to check upcoming events to be sure I don’t schedule something in conflict (like missing a Parent-Teacher conference).

My mother and in-laws are also local and they love having a way to see upcoming events like the grandchildren’s concerts and dance recitals.

Prior to Chandler (we’ve been using it for over a year now) we maintained a paper-based calendar (really the school calendar with our notes). I can’t imagine going back to that.

Regards,

-Dave

Note: Not Real Data

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.

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 release contains bugfixes, stability improvements and general polish. For a more complete list of recently introduced features please see the release notes for our 0.16.0 release.

Chandler Server 1.0.0 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_1.0.0

Send us feedback at the open mailing list (no subscription required):

chandler-users@osafoundation.org

The bugs fixed in this release include:

• [Bug 12242] LATER items sorted above NOW items
• [Bug 12213] NPE in EntityConverter.setCalendarAttributes()
• [Bug 12214] NPE when writing html dir index
• [Bug 12225] unhandled ItemNotFoundException thrown by findItemByPath
• [Bug 12226] migration component doesn’t build on java 1.6
• [Bug 12236] modification links included in occurrence atom entries
• [Bug 12113] website needs feedback mechanism
• [Bug 12194] unable to create free-busy ticket using account browser
• [Bug 12206] exdate is added after “all future items” change
• [Bug 12261] Change copy for Apple iCal subscribe button in Ticket View
• [Bug 12270] “Invite” link for subscriptions potentially confusing

As I posted in my user story, I am hopelessly disorganised. I have a theory that if I buy enough plastic boxes, I’ll attain the miraculous state of ‘in control’. Bits of paper containing ‘notes to self’ used to be found months after they’d been written, by which time it was too late to do anything with them.

OneNote has become my one piece of paper. On my tablet PC, I can hand write notes as I’m on the phone to customers. I can use it creatively for something like mind mapping - free-form, different colours, engage both sides of the brain. I can print web pages to it, embed photos and web clippings, possible solutions to problems - anything relating to anything, and all shared between whichever machines I’m using at the time.

Chandler provides diary and task management capabilities, shared between myself and my wife. I tend to use OneNote for the ‘capture’ phase and for organising my thoughts, then Chandler manages the next actions, appointments, and reminders.

Typically, I create a list of actions in OneNote, hit a hot key in AutoHotKey and the selected action will be copied to clipboard and pasted to a new task in Chandler.

One feature of OneNote is a right-click “copy this page’s URL to clipboard” and I’m envisaging modifying my script to create a task in Chandler and then paste the URL of the OneNote page into Chandler’s notes field, providing a one-click link back to the original OneNote page. Also, I’m looking at an AutoHotKey script to copy a task in OneNote and paste it into Chandler’s search box, so that I’ve got a kludgey but fairly seamless each way link between items.

So nothing too complicated, just a quick means of linking items in each app to each other.

Note To make it so that Chandler recognizes OneNote URLs, you must first apply this patch. However, if enough OneNote users pipe up with feedback that this would be very useful, we will up the priority on making it so OneNote URLs work by default.

Note: Not real data.

User Support Hour

When: August 4, 2-3PM PDT
Where: IRC
Channel: #chandler

To kick things off, we’ll be holding User Support Hour. Please join us if you’d like to share or learn how others use Chandler or simply want help getting set up or troubleshooting a problem.

Then stick around and provide input for developers:

Scratch Your Chandler Itch

When: August 4, 3-5PM PDT
Where: IRC
Channel: #chandler

If you know a little Python, and would like focused help from the Chandler development team, we have a few projects we think might make good starter projects both for introducing Chandler’s code to new developers and addressing real pain points in the product. Please feel free to add your own!

• More alarm snooze options
• Shortcut from the reminder pop-up to the item details
• More commands for the Quick Entry field (e.g. for filing items, etc)
• Download flagged emails (IMAP)
• Customize App Bar: Add Tasks, define a “Notes-only” area, etc)
• Print Triage List

See full list.

If you want to participate, start by checking out Chandler using SVN

Hack On Chandler Server

When: August 5, 3-5PM PDT
Where: IRC
Channel: #cosmo

We’ll finish off our community sessions with a session aimed at people conversant with Java or Javascript who’d like to improve the server.

• Port the iGoogle quick entry widget to iPhone, OSX Dashboard, Vista Sidebar, Yahoo Konfabulator
• UI for setting up Notifications (via email)
• UI for importing .ics calendar files through web UI

If you want to participate, start by checking out Chandler Server using SVN.

RSVP

We’d like to get a head count of who might participate. If you’re planning on attending, or if you’d like to participate but can’t make those times, please let us know by this Friday.

Thanks,
The Chandler Team

I’ve mostly been thinking of URLs in terms of web URLs, but a couple of users have been testing out the new URL functionality with file system links. Chandler can recognize URLs for files, folders, and applications.

So in addition to web URLs, you can also keep track of documents you’re working on with triage status, tickler alarms and the calendar.

1. Log in to Chandler Hub and open collection details for collection you want to receive notifications for (click on down arrow next to collection name in collection list):

   

2. If it hasn’t been done already, click [Invite] to generate sharing links.
3. Right-click or Cmd-Click (Mac) on either one of the [Invite] link to Copy Link. (Note Collections you subscribed to will only display 1 “Invite” link, the link you used to subscribe.)
4. Log in to your Google Calendar account
5. In your calendar list, click on [Add] pulldown and select Add by URL

   

6. Paste the URL obtained in step 2 into Public Calendar Address field, changing “pim” to “webcal”. The URL should look something like: https://hub.chandlerproject.org/pim/collection/215715b0-5a0b-11dd-92a1-e12efc62301d?ticket=26htadc0
7. Click [Add]
8. In the calendar list, click on the down arrow and select Notifications

   

9. Setup daily agenda email or SMS

You are done! Google Calendar will automatically refresh the URL every few hours and will send a daily agenda to you at 5am every morning.

Of course there are some limitations. The email will go to your gmail account, the agenda only includes events, there is a possibility of data being out of date, there is no triage status information, and no way to link back to the original items on Chandler Hub. Of course, this is why we are currently developing these features for the server!