Development [LWN.net]

The Chandler Project moves forward

By Forrest Cook
February 12, 2008

The Chandler Project is a small-group collaboration application that is being produced by the non-profit Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF). OSAF was founded by Mitchell Kapor. The foundation's History document reveals some background information. The project has been under development for a number of years. Version 0.1 of Chandler was announced in April, 2003.

From the Chandler FAQ entry on What is Chandler?

Chandler Project is an open source, standards-based personal information manager (PIM) built around small group collaboration and a core set of information management workflows modelled on Inbox usage patterns and David Allen's GTD (Getting Things Done) methodology. See Vision for a more in-depth answer to this question.

Chandler provides an all-inclusive view of personal information, it can operate on notes, email, tasks, appointments, events, contacts, documents and additional personal resources. The Chandler Desktop application provides a single user interface with the ability to enter, view, search, group and share all of the supported types of information. The software is cross-platform, it currently runs on the Linux, Windows and Macintosh platforms. The Chandler software is being distributed under version 2.0 of the Apache Software License.

The Chandler features document explains how the project is arranged:

Chandler consists of a cross-platform (Windows, Mac OS X and Linux) Chandler Desktop application and Chandler Hub, a sharing service and web application. Chandler is open source and standards-based.

The FeatureList document covers the Chandler capabilities in more detail, some screenshots are included. OSAF provides free access to the Chandler Hub, information there is available to any user with an account and a web browser. The Chandler Server provides a central store for locally managed information. There are some demo movies that show Chandler in action, some of the basic Chandler concepts and terms are explained:

Item Chandler has four kinds of items: Note, Message, Task and Event. Chandler items can be of multiple kinds, e.g. Scheduled Tasks and Invitations.
Collection Chandler's primary mechanism for grouping items. Collections can contain items of any kind.
Application Area Chandler has four application areas: Mail, Tasks, Calendar and an all-inclusive All area. Chandler's application areas are a way to filter down your collections by item kind.
Triage Status An attribute on every item that is Chandler's principle mechanism for helping you manage what you're working on. The three triage statuses are NOW, LATER and DONE.
Tickler Alarm A custom alarm you can set on any item to automatically triage that item to NOW at a time you specify.

Two new releases were recently announced, Chandler Desktop 0.7.4 and Chandler Server 0.12.0. The new Chandler Desktop change summary says: "The 0.7.4 release adds a Tip of the day feature and a German translation contributed by a user. The triage status behavior was improved to be more useful. There have been dozens of bug fixes across the application, as well as fixes to the build and testing infrastructures." The new Chandler Server change summary says: "This release supports a standalone WAR form of Cosmo ready to drop in to an existing Tomcat installation. A security issue allowing unauthorized access when a collection had been shared was fixed. A number of smaller bugs have also been fixed for Unicode usernames, error logging, and the calendar web UI."

Chandler is in an active phase of development. The software has evolved from an interesting concept to a functioning system in recent years. Organizations and individuals who have a need for some advanced management and communications capabilities should be able to find some benefits from using Chandler.

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