[Dev] Chandler 0.6 new user experience

[Jules]

Hi, just thought you guys would appreciate some feedback on the 0.6 
release.  I last looked at chandler some time between the 0.1 and 0.2 
releases, so this is an almost-fresh perspective on it for you.  
Apologies if any of the below are known problems; in that case just take 
them as suggestions that the problem is important.  OS is Windows XP 
SP2; a Linux-based server is available for information sharing (I 
believe this is achieved through WebDAV, which I have no experience of, 
but am confident I can set up).  User is an experienced developer 
looking for a suitable task list & calendar application for a small 
workgroup (3 individuals working for a small IT services company).

First thing I notice is that startup is very slow.  On my PII-400, it 
took about 20 seconds for the splash screen to appear, and well over a 
minute for the application to load.  Memory usage is also very high: 
about 75MB without anything added to the calendar.  For an app that I 
would want to leave running constantly, this is just too much.  Combine 
with 40MB for a web browser & another 30 for e-mail and my 256MB of 
system RAM is starting to run out already.  If e-mail could be added to 
Chandler without a noticeable increase in the memory footprint it 
wouldn't be hideously bad, but it's still a little high.

When I delete the "Welcome to Chandler" appointment, the information on 
it in the side bar isn't removed.

Creating a new item for the task list is not very intuitive.  The tick 
mark in the button to add it to the list seems to imply that the item 
has already been performed.  If I press this button, then press it again 
(because a tick mark appeared next to the item and I thought I'd done 
something wrong) and then try to do something else, it seems that the 
item is lost and I have to re-enter it.  A "this item is not stored 
anywhere, do you really want to abandon it?" dialog would be useful. 
[added later: somehow I've found the item again.  It isn't entirely 
clear to me where it has been in the meantime, but it does seem to have 
worked somewhat.]

Somehow I seem to have created new items in the "Trash" folder, which I 
then have to move to "My tasks".  Not sure what's going on there, but it 
doesn't seem sensible, whatever it is.  Perhaps a confirmation dialog if 
the user tries to create something in the trash folder would be sensible?

I have two "Untitled" items in my Trash folder because of this, but 
can't seem to delete them from it.  I assume this is because delete 
works by moving stuff into Trash.  It should change behaviour when the 
item is already in Trash so that the item is totally purged.  It would 
also be useful to have "Empty Trash" as a context menu item if you 
right-click on Trash.

Printing of task lists isn't implemented.  This effectively rules out 
using the current version for my purposes, but I suppose it's now a 
priority task for future, unless I can achieve what's necessary using 
the calendar.  I'll switch to that approach.

Adding a recurring event is confusing.  I double click at the top of 
today, and get a new event dialog in the sidebar which is good.  I then 
choose 'daily' from the recurrence drop down list (I'd have liked an 
option for 'on alternate days' or similar, but understand that that's an 
unusual requirement; 'weekdays' would also have been useful).  I click 
on the content box to edit that, then realise that I need to change the 
title, so I click on that.  At this point, I get a dialog asking me if I 
want to change all future occurrences of the event.  As far as I'm 
concerned, I'm still working on the first addition of it, so of course I 
do.  I'm then asked again when I go back to editing the content.  I 
think the question should only ever be asked if the item has been 
'closed' since it was created, and even then it should only be asked 
once per editing session.

The way calendars are printed is next to useless.  The first problem is 
that  'all day' events are not included.  Also, the event details aren't 
included, only the little marker that shows up on the calendar with the 
item's title.  I'd also like to be able to print out just a single day's 
appointments, in a kind of expanded form of the summary that appears in 
the view in the bottom left of the Chandler window, but including all 
the details of the item rather than just its time & title.

At this point I realise that Chandler is not yet ready for my 
application and uninstall it.  I hope this feedback can help improve the 
next version, though, and look forward to trying it!