[chandler-users] Re: Using Chandler

[Sam Halliday]

(originally in response to Mimi's e-mail at bottom... copied here as  
it may be of interest to other users)

Hi Mimi,

I did actually try out the desktop client on OS X Leopard, but it  
timed out when attempting to connect to the server. It seemed to pick  
up on the SSL certificate ok, but after that it was just a whole lot  
of waiting. Regardless, the web interface is much more important for  
us because it is accessible anywhere and there is much more chance of  
getting everybody to use it!

To be honest, I am not at all interested in handing over my e-mail  
handling to Chandler... I have years of e-mails archived in Mail and I  
love it to pieces. I see e-mail and project management as two  
completely separate tools. Although they work together, I don't feel  
one needs to embed the other. For example... the convenient mailto  
links in the web interface are very handy (they'd be even handier if  
they embedded links in them to shared collections/events!), but I  
wouldn't want anything more than this.

Although the desktop client is capable of sending events and tasks to  
other users as e-mails... this is not quite what I mean (the web  
interface can also do this). I would like the ability to create an  
event, which I can send on to people for inclusion in their calendar  
(granted, e-mail could be a possible medium to do this). If I update  
the event, their (read-only) event (which is actually in their  
calendar, *not* in one of their subscriptions) gets updated as well. I  
do not believe the Chandler server (not the web app) even supports  
such a setup... and it's this support that I am requesting.

Perhaps related, I believe the web interface could benefit from a  
message passing system between registered users... but not e-mail.  
More like a notice board of incoming actions, where the kinds of  
actions you can send out are limited to things like:-

- create an invitation for a user to subscribe to my calendar
- invite a user to attend my event
- assign a task to a user
- accept or reject an invitation (calendars, events or tasks... the  
response the above 3 actions)

I'm actually able to hack on Java, so I'd be interested in learning  
more about the guts of Chandler. I'm not so up on my Spring/JSP so I  
might give the web app work a miss... but I'd love to perhaps work on  
a J2ME or twitter-based client (well, a twitter bot that can speak to  
Cosmo). Although, if there is any engine work that you need a hand  
with, please let me know. I have Hibernate/JPA/Tomcat experience.

On 1 Feb 2008, at 22:53, Mimi Yin wrote:
> Thanks for writing in with all this great feedback. I understand  
> you've set up your own server. I wonder if you've considered  
> downloading and using the Desktop client against the server instead  
> of the web UI.
>
> http://chandlerproject.org/Projects/DownloadChandlerDesktop
>
> It sounds like you're looking to work quite a bit in the app and the  
> Desktop client provides a more robust user experience right now. For  
> example, most of the things you've requested below are already  
> supported in the Desktop.
>
> + Locale detection with appropriate date formats
> + Auto-save
> + Ability to share
> + Assigning tasks to others (via email)
> + Sending events to others (via email)
> + Re-ordering collections (it's been implemented but isn't yet  
> available in an end-user release)
> + Better parsing for dates and times
> + Server time-out issues
>
> Here's the bug for reordering collections. When Grant checks in the  
> patch, feel free to apply it and try it out.
> https://bugzilla.osafoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5058