Update on Chandler, Nov 29

It has been over a year since I last investigated the Chandler interpersonal information manager from the Open Source Applications Foundation, but with the OSAF President and Chair Mitch Kapor due to speak at When 2.0 at Stanford University next week, I decided to get an update. Based on reading the OSAF web site (that is, without an actual briefing), here's my understanding of the state of play.

Chandler: Unified Collaboration Client
The long term vision for Chandler remains the same, that is the delivery of a cross-platform unified collaboration client that permits messaging, calendaring, the sharing of item collections (via shared access to common servers, or peer-to-peer synchronization), and the ability to associate different items of multiple types for display in a single integrated view/list. It appears to be a potential solution to the problems I talked about in my Collaboration Software Clients: Part 1 paper last year (and no, I haven't written Part 2 yet).

In terms of the here-and-now, however, OSAF has changed from a "great leap forward" strategy to one based on the incremental delivery of usable functionality, with intelligent calendaring (Pillar 4) being the prima facie focus of current iterations of the Chandler client. This seems like a good move on multiple levels ... calendaring is definitely broken, so people recognize the pain and should therefore be willing to try something new that may solve the pain. It's also a good idea because it turns the project from something that may never be achieved, into a set of smaller highly-focused deliverables. And finally, it gives OSAF the opportunity to get real hands-on experience with the current CalDAV standard, on which its people are key contributors, and to carve out an early niche for CalDAV compliant offerings.

Chandler 0.5 is currently freely available as a stable release, and a Milestone 8 release is available for those wanting to get a sense of what the 0.6 release will include (I downloaded the Mac OS X edition, at 37.9MB; Windows 2000/XP and Linux editions are also available); 0.6 is due on December 19, 2005.

One of the neat capabilities in Chandler is the ability to enter appointments based on a nominated time zone, and to have those render appropriately according to the time zone one is currently in. In the screen shot below, the When 2.0 appointment correctly shows for New Zealand time at 4am-5pm on Wednesday December 7, which is the correct translation for 7am-8pm on Tuesday December 6. When the master time zone is changed, Chandler re-calculates scheduled appointments in the right way. It definitely beats manually counting hours forward and backwards in the products that are available today.

Two New Product under Development at OSAF
Since I last reviewed the OSAF strategy, two new products have been added:

• Cosmo is the code-name for a server. It offers two main capabilities: a file store for WebDAV clients, and a calendaring server for CalDAV clients. The latter is intended to offer a general-purpose CalDAV calendar sharing environment for calendaring clients, although in the short-term it is essentially targeted at Chandler. It is currently available in a 0.2.3 release (released November 16 2005, featuring a new data repository). It does not offer content management capabilities.


• Snoopy. In essense, Snoopy provides a Web-based interface to item collections stored on the Cosmo server, with a current especial emphasis on publish-and-subscribe calendars. It will enable Chandler users to get access to their item collections from any Web browser, and will enable Chandler users to share calendars (and in the future, other item collections) with non-Chandler users.

Have You Tried Chandler Recently?
Have you recently investigated Chandler or the associated offering from OSAF? I'd love to hear your reaction, either by email or via a comment below.

Comments

[FEula]

I tried CalDAV on my Windows XP machine (2.8 GHz Pentium 4). However, it was extremely slow. I'm not sure if this is due to the underlying architecture (it runs on some scripting language, right?), or if it is due to its early development stage.