[chandler-users] Some thoughts about Chandler

[Philippe Bossut]

Hi Marcelo,

Thanks for giving Chandler a spin. I don't have answers to all of  
your questions but we'll try my best :)

On Jan 13, 2008, at 12:43 PM, Marcelo de Moraes Serpa wrote:

> * Why the items in the "IN" collection can't go to the HUB?
>   I've inputed dozens of items in the "IN" collection at work,  
> synced Chandler with the HUB just to find out at home that the  
> items in the "IN" collection weren't there.

The "In" collection is one of the 4 "OOTB" (Out Of The Box)  
collections and is just here to give some familiarity to people used  
to email clients. The "In" collection is however only an automatic  
collection that gathers the emails sent to you and transfered to  
Chandler. On a practical level, you should never create items in  
there and, most of the time, you should use it only to check email  
items that may have been sent to you so that you can process them in  
Chandler (stamp them, move them to other collections, triage them).

For your new items you wish to upload to Hub, you need to create them  
in a collection that you published to your Hub account. Here's a  
quick run down:
- create a collection if you don't have one (Menu Collection>>New)  
and give it a name (e.g. "Work")
- publish that collection to your Hub account (Menu Share>>Publish...)
-> You're now set to create items and get them synced to the Hub
- with the collection selected in the left panel and the "All" button  
selected in the toolbar, create a new task by typing "/task This  to  
do" in the Quick Entry field (the text field in the toolbar)
-> The item is now created locally but not yet saved to the local  
repo let alone synced to the Hub. Both of these operations happen in  
the background in normal operation (during change of context for repo  
commit and on a timed basis for the Hub sync). For this example,  
we'll force things a little...
- Save the item to the repo (menu File>>Save Changes)
- Force sync the collection (menu File>>Sync>>Work, assuming Work is  
the collection you created)
-> Now the item has been uploaded to the Hub


> * No undo feature for edited items?
>   I've deleted the whole text content for a task item and couldn't  
> undo the changes.

Yeap, indeed, there's no Undo and you'll be right to guess that it's  
a reported bug...

In your case though, there's a local undo for text deletion that's  
accessible with the context menu (right click). I just tested it and,  
strangely, I had to use "Undo" twice to get my deleted text back...  
Hmm... Sounds like a bug but I eventually got my text back :)

> * Why no support for sub-collections?
>    Sub-collections should be supported. If the user does not want  
> to use it then ok, but there are many problems that are better  
> modeled with hierarchical structures, instead of flat ontes.


Yeap, that was a design decision. Note that one item can be in  
multiple collections at the same time so, fundamentally, that notion  
of hierarchy doesn't exist in Chandler (another reason why it's not  
in the UI). It helps to think of collections as tags. Unfortunately,  
there are a number of UI road blocks that make that thinking bumping  
into other sort of problems.


> * The user interfaces has too many quirks
>  Sometimes things just halt, sometimes the response time is too  
> high, why is the user interface so buggy? Even the web interface of  
> the HUB feels more responsible than the one of the client. For  
> example, while trying to move 20 items from one collection to  
> another by batch-selecting then and moving (drag n' drop), Chandler  
> halted about 5 times before I could complete the operation (I had  
> to kill the process and start it again).
>
> * The sync feature isn't clear to me. I.e: I had this error while  
> trying to sync a collection: "Recordset contains invalid data:  
> Could not apply EIM recordset xxxxxx due to invalid data: "Unknown  
> timezone BRT (HTTP STATUS 400)" and this collection just wouldn't  
> sync.

I think the best thing is to log bugs for those 2 things.

There are other questions in your emails I didn't answer but wanted  
to give you some answers where I could.

Cheers,
- Philippe