• TrayIt for Windows: www.teamcti.com/trayit
• AllTray for Linux: alltray.sourceforge.net

See instructions on how to set up Chandler IMAP folders.

How are you making using of Chandler’s IMAP folders?

…I just figured out a pretty good way to add things to Chandler on the move. I can send texts to e-mail addresses, so I set up a filter to put emails from my cell phone in the proper IMAP folder. It works pretty well for me…

-Avner Shanan-

Chandler notes (starred or plain) should now show up in other iCalendar or CalDAV calendar applications (e.g. Apple iCal, and Lightning) as Tasks (VTODOS).

Here are instructions on how to subscribe to Chandler collections from other calendar applications. (Unfortunately, some Chandler-specific will be lost. e.g. NOW and LATER triage status will both be interpreted as “Not-Done”. Anytime events will look the same as All-day events.)

I also demo this in the second half of the new 3-Minute Feature Tour. Also available (lo-res) on YouTube.

Has anyone made use of this feature yet?

The detail view effort aimed to simplify what users see as they create and edit their data. Now, a simple note looks like this:

We’ve moved the Remove and Save buttons to the top, so they don’t shift around as the detail view size changes. We’ve also simplified the UI for adding the “star” stamp (which used to be called task) and adding to the calendar.

Throughout the new UI, we make use of dojo’s elaborate support for fades, which help make expand and disappear changes easier to follow.

One of these fade-ins happens if you click on “ADD TO CALENDAR” or the event icon.

To reduce clutter, we’ve used more hint-text in widgets and fewer permanent labels. We also hide event related widgets that don’t apply to the current event. So, for example, “anytime” events which don’t have a start time don’t need a timezone, so we don’t display a timezone picker until you choose a start time for your event.

We’ve also made a much-clamored for addition for events, a date picker. Happily, dojo gave us this for free.

Once you fill in a start-date, end-date defaults to start-date.

Finally, we’ve moved our notes field to dojo’s expanding text area. So if you’ve got three pages of notes, the notes field (and the entire detail view pane) will automatically expand to give you room to type everything.

For reference, here’s a snapshot of the old detail view.

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