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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
Cheap UK and US VPS
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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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.
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
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...
You can sort of click-drag on the weekly calendar, to add an appointment. It's not totally non-interactive :-)
I immediately noticed that this is a non-standard windows application.
The curse of wxWindows. You can right an application that runs on Windows 95, WindowsXP, Mac OSX, Gnome and KDE, but it won't comply with any of the user interface guidelines on any of them, but at least everyone will be confused equally and on all platforms at the same time.
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
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 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?
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).
I'm more interested in testing Rachel 0.1, and to a lesser extent, Monica and Phoebe 0.1.