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Chandler 0.1 Released
kolchak writes "Very promising news is Chandler 0.1 (the Open Source PIM) has finally been released. 'While we are still very early in the design and
implementation process, we intend for this 0.1 release to make us a more
fully open project. We have made the release available for download,
opened up our bug tracking database, and opened our source code
repository.'" This is Mitch Kapor's attempt to offer an alternative to Microsoft Outlook, especially to small (under 100-person) organizations, last mentioned in December.
No virus propagation yet though, it is only 0.1 I suppose.
Please note that this is not a straight replacement, or something that is like outlook (that is what kroupware etc is aiming for) but they are aiming more to change things to make it better.
:)
Btw, did anyone find any screenshots?
When I went to have a look at the site I had a list of things I would want to see. These were
Diary
Sharing of Calenders
Phone book
Now this has all of them as well as a few other cools things like inbuilt IM. Good luck to them I say. However I'm not sure but does the system has a centeral server it good log into rather than just peer to peer as it says?
Rus
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Personal Information Manager
Nothing to see here, move on, move on.
I just got the XP build, and I can't really see how it bloated to 13mb already. I'll have assume that there's a really large API behind the scenes, because the interface is little more than a MyFirstCalendarApp.vb
Oh and 10 seconds saw me crashing it too, just like the other poster.
Still, it's 0.1, so I'm not grumbling yet.
Note that Lotus Agenda, a distant ancestor of this program, is available for free. It's tricky toget working on a new PC, its interface is abysmally clunky by today's standard, but its approach to PIM (that's Personal Information Management) is really great. Agenda was for managing ANY information that you, personally, might want to track. It's like a dynamically-typed relational database, or something.
Call it the law of Open Source Pangloss Parity: No one will use a piece of consumer oriented open source software unless it looks and behaves exactly like some piece of Microsoft software, no matter how badly the behavior of said MS software was designed.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
Not coincidentally, the list of supported platforms is the same as wxWindows, since Chandler is written in Python and uses the wxPython GUI toolkit, which is a Python binding to wxWindows.
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This seem to be another open-source program that try to involve EVERYTHING (email, calendar, chat, documents etc).
;) ).
Well as it is coded in python, this is pretty multiple-platform compatible.
I extracted the windows zip-file and ran the chandler.bat
FIRST IMPRESSIONS
I clicked next on the welcome picture. I immediately noticed that this is a non-standard windows application..
The first thing I tried was simple outlook behaviour. It shows the calendar, but it does not feature any clicking in the calendar (like adding appointments etc). But the weeks are displayed correctly.
It seems like this program is like alpha alpha, and it does not give any functionality (unless you like watching on a week
Ok good luck to the authors. I still think you have a very long way untill you can compete with outlook etc. I suggest taking a look at Evolution first.
Could this software BE any more released?
From the article: Our product (code-named "Chandler" after the great detective novelist Raymond Chandler,)
Are these people so out of touch with the world most of us live in that they don't realize a lot of people will think of that goofy guy from "Friends" when they hear this name? Personally, I don't want my applications behaving anything like this guy.
Oh, and does this make Outlook Chandler's cross-dressing dad?
A quick peek at their site did not reveal any information about support for various mobile devices. For me, at least, it's crucial that my calendar app can be easily synchronized with whatever mobile gizmo I happen to be using as a calendar. While Outlook is the only viable alternative (for good or bad, I'm not a Lotus user), this thing gets only a "thumbs up" from me.
A bloated e-mail client.
I like my e-mail client and my calendar separate, thank you very much, just like I like my e-mail client and my browser separate, and my e-mail client and my text editor separate. It's good that they can talk to one another, yes; but gluing them together is a lousy idea.
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You cannot wash away blood with blood
Well, if Evolution is a clone, doesn't it compare to Outlook? I think Evolution has pretty much the same advantage/disadvantage rating as Outlook. In what way does not Evolution compare to Outlook?
(Really - I'm curious!)
Roses are #FF0000, violets are #0000FF, all my base are belong to you
It's nice to see that have included so much documentation about the architecture & philosophy, considering how early in the development they are. That's *real* openness.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
It uses python dude. Python runs on FreeBSD.
If the goal is to have it used by small and medium sized businesses, why aren't there versions for Win 2000, or 98 ?? Most of the small businesses due to budget restrictions haven't yet updated to Win XP - esp due to its activation feature.
Has anyone tried to install Chandler on older Win versions?
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
Okay, I understand this is /. and nobody reads the articles, but why did this have to be modded up? Come on now! It takes 2 clicks, and about 3 seconds to find the list of downloads, which includes Windows...
/. summary in the comments section!
Next up, comments asking for someone to repost the
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I made a few screenshots. If anyone would mind mirroring them please. My little server is made from trashcan pickings (only the primo stuff :) ) and a crappy 128Kb pipe. It'll get crushed pronto...
I believe it's using python and wxWindows for the front end, so I assume it will work fine.
Slashdot looked deep within my soul and assigned
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The server is....we need a usable, easily deployable MS-Exchange/Notes server competitor.
Sure you can build things with LDAP/Imap/web-mail and make them all talk to one-another, BUT you need a server then does alot of this for you...
Until you can point and click your way through a server installation you're not going to win over the MS-Exchange sites.
Yes SuSE have their openmail thing, but need a 'freeware' version of this that runs on *nix (ie more than just Linux, but the *BSD,SOlaris, HPUX, AIX variants as well - like Apache does).
--
Martin
The problem is the dearth of apps that already do this, and try and do it like Outlook does for no good reason other than that.
Sure there are reasons for trying to make things Outlook-alike, ease of migration for one, but are you sure the Outlook way is the right way? I for one don't use it being of the *nix persuasion, but I have to support it from an administration POV, and I find myself going through the setup/option dialogs in circles. It sucks from that perspective alone.
Good for them that they're at least trying to do things differently rather than write Yet Another Outlook Clone.
I love Evolution. It is the best thing to have happened to my mail reading in years. I currently run the 1.3.2 prerelease, and I enjoy it immensely despite a number of bugs and other issues.
/Janne
That said, Evolution is not an answer. Evo is a client. The server side is almost totally lacking. Chandler provides this in the form of a Peer-to-Peer style server/client architecture. What could (and, I believe, should) be done is to write an extension/plugin for Evolution to access the Chandler server functionality. That way you can use Evo as part of a Chandler setup, or use Chandlers own frontend whichever one you want/like.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Evolution is an outlook-workalike. That is to say, PIM defined as "Personal-Information management" i.e. "Information about people".
Chandler is a modernised Lotus Agenda. That is to say, PIM defined as "Personal Information-Management" i.e. "Information I personally want to manage"
Bit of a difference.
It is not the outlook client that is of most interest, it is replacing exchange as backend that we should replace first...
Kolab server already does this [replacing exchange servers]. It works with either Outlook clients, or KMail clients.
There's never been anything like Agenda, before or since. Now, THERE was software!
DOS-based, fast as lightning, completely (and intimidatingly) customizable (It opened into a blank page, if I recall correctly). It took any bit of info you wanted to throw at, and allowed you to establish your own relations among the bits. It was a database, an organizer, a rolodex, a "sketchpad for ideas," it was transcendant! No online component (E-Mail, Web) cuz there was no online component to your life -- this was circa 91-92.
In the small office where I was the Tech guru at the time, no two workers' Agenda looked and ran the same -- everybody used it a different way, and the interface reflected that (Ultimately, it was probably that aspect of it which prevented it's widespread adoption in bigger shops.)
Then along came Windows 3.1 and the Web, and upheaval. Lotus spiked Agenda, replacing it with a Win-based Lotus Organizer 1.0. I moved the company over to Jensen's "Commence" program, which held some of Agenda's flavor but proved an administrative bear.
If Chandler can even approach lighting a candle to Agenda (sorry...) -- and run on Linux as well -- I'm there, Opneing Day. But I suspect it'll be targeting the regimented Outlook suits, and not us "Agenda hippies"...
phpGroupware exposed their API through both SOAP and XML-RPC, and I have yet to see *anything* use their backend, other than an old Delphi frontend for WinXX which was yanked from their site. I'm sure there are other web-based groupware suites that also have web-services available, and yet no one wants to build interfaces to them?
Don't get me wrong, Evolution is a nice toy, but only that in the realm of business until someone decides that they want to interface it with an existing groupware server (other than Exchange, which is quite closed-source...), since otherwise there is no open solution to doing this.
I contacted the Evolution people at least a year ago about interfacing with phpGroupware, to get a reply of "if you can reverse-engineer our calendar API, which isn't documented anywhere, you can write it yourself...". (No disrespect to the developers of Evolution intended, but I'm trying to make a point about the little emphasis any of the major groups seem to place on enterprise adoption.)
"He may look like an idiot, and talk like an idiot, but don't let that fool you. He really is an idiot." - Duck Soup
Um, wait...
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
I thought that was the point behind Chandler. Mitch Kapoor was the guy behind Agenda and is the guy behind this... If you read his articles on the subject then I would hope that we will some Agenda-like functionality.
Of course, we're only on 0.1, so what we get here is hardly representative of what might come.
I have found another similar project based on Java and using a decentralized (p2p) architecture http://www.dynamicobjects.com/
Chandler makes the exchange/server component redundant in the first place. It's purely p2p and all that jazz... there is no need for an exchange server. At least, not according to the design philosophy they are pitching. Which is a good one.
The one thing that will be interesting is what happens when they realize that in most organizations people turn off their machines at night. Will they write a caching server for people's calendars and such? Or will those people's shared resources just vanish?
There's 114 comments and his site hasn't been /.ed yet and I just downloaded chandler at almost 200KB/s.
On the surface p2p sounds like a great idea for a PIM app that needs collaboration. Then I start thinking about the holes this leaves. Suppose I use a laptop at work and take it home every now and then. If I leave at 4 and somebody wants to schedule a meeting with me for 7:00 AM the next day after I have left, how does it then confirm the appointment? If I just turn my machine off at night then anybody that wants to poll my schedule will have to wait until I come in in the morning. The next hurdle to get over would be the bandwidth issues. P2P apps are necessarily chatty. On a small lan that might not be such a big deal but a decent sized company will surely squash this like netbios. Will anybody want to invest in a program that they know their company will not be able to use a few years down the road when they have tripled in size? Realistically speaking most small companies are not going to triple in size in the next few years but admitting so is like saying that their growth is permantly stunted.
In Republican America phones tap you.
IMHO, programs that use the new ical format for storing calendar data are the most useful. I can parse ical files easily with perl (or heck, even bash and egrep) and do all sorts of fun things with the data. There's even a php script that parses ical files for display on your website. Add webdav to your server and you've got a free calendar server for you and your closest friends.
(Sorry for the shameless ical plug).
http://www.ScheduleWorld.com/ :-)
Schedule your world with ScheduleWorld.com http://www.ScheduleWorld.com/ (Java Web Startable)
Here is Chandler running on Mac OS X. It seems to have UI issues, or issues with my screen size since some of the icons in the upperleft are obscured by the menu bar. Chandler: http://homepage.mac.com/zizban/chandler.jpg
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
I think the word you were looking for is "plethora." The opposite of dearth.
Syntax error: loose != lose, affect != effect, then!=than
One problem is that a large percentage of business users use Windows because of Outlook. I can certainly say for myself that although there are reasonable Linux (and Mac) replacements for Word, PowerPoint, and even Excel, I have not yet seen any other application that duplicates the functionality (breadth and depth) of Outlook.
As a "knowledge worker" I'd estimate I spend 50% of my day in Outlook. Outlook really is aimed at managing your working information - emailing or calling someone in your address book, filing the notes you make on that contact, making an appointment in your calendar for that contact, etc. Plus, it integrates perfectly with Exchange server, which like it or not runs a lot of businesses.
Don't get me wrong, I hate a lot of Outlook, but having tried various replacements (Linux-based and Windows) I keep coming back to Outlook. Its the lesser of the various evils.
Because of this, I think it is admirable for folks to have another try at beating Outlook. Evolution, etc haven't done that yet, but perhaps one day Chandler, Evolution, or one of the others will do so. I will happily switch from Outlook when that day comes.
--- There's no place like 127.0.0.1
Strike open-source add a couple of $$$s and you've got Lotus Notes...
I'm more interested in testing Rachel 0.1, and to a lesser extent, Monica and Phoebe 0.1.