Chandler: free, open calendar with awesome sharing
For the last two months, I've been using Chandler as my sole calendaring app on my Ubuntu laptop. Chandler is a free, open calendaring program with a lot of innovative rethinking of how to do groupware right -- the web-based sharing technology is especially good. (I'm a very heavy calendar user and I really need industrial strength scheduling)
It's still very early beta, and there's a lot of polish missing from the current builds, but in the short time I've been using it, I've seen it make massive improvements. I'm really looking forward to future releases -- give it a whirl, send 'em some feedback, or hack some code.
LinkChandler gives you the flexibility to collaborate with others on projects at a variety of different levels. Take full advantage of all the Chandler Desktop features by collaborating with other desktop users in your office to share read-only or writeable calendars, tasks, messages, notes and keep track of priorities. You can also manage a shared task list or calendar with others who prefer to use their web browser directly with Chandler Hub, they don't even have to have an account on the server to access the information you share with them.
Chandler Hub is a common connection to share your schedule and coordinate with other people. Chandler Hub supports you whether you're a committed everyday user or just 'dropping in' to leave a comment. Begin collaborating with other people today without all the commitments. Find flexibility in Chandler Hub--all the tools you'll need in work collaboration or to just simply keep yourself organized.
the latest
latest episodes
You are aware, of course, that Mitch Kapor has withdrawn from the project, along with his funding?
http://whydoeseverythingsuck.com/2008/01/rip-mitch-kapors-chandler.html
Official statement:
http://blog.chandlerproject.org/2008/01/08/osaf-transitions/
They laid off nearly 2/3 of their staff on Tuesday.
Past two months under Ubuntu, really?
I've been trying to use every one of their "releases" for years now and up until last month, I had a bitch of time getting Chandler to work Ubuntu (Gutsy or Feisty).
I'm no Linux newbie either.
Anyways, this has to be one of the most depressing OpenSource projects I have followed.. A ton of money, talent, etc wasted.
I'm actually reading a book about the s/w development for this project. "Dreaming In Code", by Scott Rosenberg, listed as a co-founder of salon.com. Surprisingly excellent.
Chandler seems to have been going for years. It was originally envisioned as a complimentary calendaring system for Evolution. It's nice that it's advancing but it must have been going for about four years now (just read the link in #1 - SIX years) and to go that far without a 1.0 is rather worrying. iCal and Google Calendar have risen and matured in that time, and while there isn't a good personal and private server that will handle the .ics format in a useful way (Chandler imports it rather than serves it by the looks of it) and I'm happy to give it a try, I seem to have settled on Lightning for Thunderbird for my what-day-is-it-and-where-should-I-be needs and would like to see a calendar server that supported that.
This is one of the reasons I've moved away from OS software except for the stuff I am willing to work on myself.
Why is it so hard for the F/OSS community to make something that is actually useful and do it right? I can't even imagine what would make this so complicated...except in the links provided by Silence it appears that this is like 99% of all projects in this community...no direction and when someone just isn't qualified to do their job, there are no actions to remove them. After all, it would be wrong to remove a volunteer (and in this case, a 'paid volunteer').
Honestly, I can't see the Exchange/Outlook benchmark is that high. It is the minimum I will accept for calendaring. I've tried Thunderbird with Lightning...and it is getting there, but until it can communicate with my Exchange server, I can't use it for general use because it leaves off the group aspect. It works well for INVITATIONS, but not for reading pre-existing cals.
The Gmail / GCal thing works pretty damn well for my side projects (not the university where 30k people use Exchange)...but I need the offline aspect hence thunderbird.
Honestly, the more folks consider apps like Chandler to be 'awesome' when it is anything but, the more the F/OSS side will suffer from the rightful perception that it just isn't good enough and F/OSS users just don't care. Makes it more and more clear that it is about the free religion instead of any actual need.
Wow, it's like a flashback to 1999 with the "open source doesn't work" comments. Clearly, one half-failed project proves it.
Yeah Matthew,
Because any of us that are commenting clearly have never tried any other open source application, nor had experience where this is the standard operating procedure with the community where any complaint is thrown back a IF IT DOESN'T WORK FOR YOU, FIX IT YOURSELF.
Nope. Never. We all made these comments based on this one project and not after a decade of being let down (though the freetards would turn that around to us letting them down or some other abjuration of responsibility).
At Penguicon 7 last year in Detroit (actually Troy), I attended one of the talks that was mostly filled with open source code types. I was there about 45 mintues early and as a newbie so I just mostly listened. I noticed that more than several people said things like, "...dude, that's becasue Windows works better..." I was surprised at the candor and the lack of people arguing that open s. had provided "better" product.
Chandler was a weird project from the get-go. Not at all structured like an open source project, rather more like a commercial application behind glass walls so you could watch.
So many bad decisions along the way, from a baroque architecture that was both complex and never fully thought out, to language and interface libraries chosen without performance benchmarking. It's unfortunate. But you see this thing all the time in industry, when you bring in too many high-level consultants, often with tons of real experience, and they over-specify or over-architect something and nothing gets built.
On the positive side of things, the CalDAV standard is rolling along nicely. Finally something open-source that truly does replace Exchange (group calendaring, resource scheduling, free-busy time allocation, etc.) and is supported by multiple vendors. OS X Leopard in particular has very good support for CalDAV right out of the box, both on the client and server. Apple's CalDAV server is actually free and open source and doesn't require OS X. There's good support on Linux too; Red Hat and IBM and Oracle are all behind CalDAV. That's what I'd recommend to Cory if he's looking for an industrial-strength solution. Not Chandler, which has never reached a practical, usable state.
Oops, looks like Cory is triggering a FOSS backlash. ;)
Seriously, I share a lot of the frustration that the other commenters have expressed. I also have a background in development, so let me share what I see as the FOSS Achilles heel:
FOSS projects avoid defining their audiences, and avoid the professional processes that keep a project tracking its audience. Then unconsciously, the project's audience defaults to a class of people I call "peer programmers"; the project becomes a vehicle for impressing one's coding peers, and it erects more infrastructure for these peers to socialize among themselves than it will ever do to socialize/market/support a mass of typical end-users. This is also why FOSS projects love *nix package repositories: It insulates the coding clique from its (poorly defined and confused) user base, letting the distro people handle those unwashed mases instead. If you don't have to distribute your wares directly to users, then the very act of getting to first base (program installation) becomes somebody else's problem and it goes downhill from there.
FOSS projects typically don't want commitments to an unknowledgeable, external group.
There are exceptions, like Mozilla, Kontact, OpenOffice.org, and some others. I would even start to consider Ubuntu in that camp (their product and focus are improving, which I largely attribute to their practice of attaching all new development to Use Cases). These have mostly inherited their project management habits from commercial software.
OTOH Mitch Kapor probably hasn't been on the coding or management end of a project since before most of today's best practices were invented. Or perhaps he has remained oblivious to them. He may even have been attracted to FOSS because it seemed like a way around all of the modern professional stuff; getting back to basics like in the old PC/XT days.
Despite such failures, I see no reason why FOSS could not internalize the best aspects of both free and commercial software. There are excellent examples out there; the required methodologies like RUP are not just known but actually standardized now. The profit motive will usually force the adoption of such best practices; but the FOSS project must choose them more out of principle.
As a developer on a F/OSS package, I can say that there are a lot of factors that are involved.
But to generalize the whole situation as an epic F/OSS v. Commercial Software battle is just applying a manichean metric to something much more complex.
Some F/OSS *is* designed to compete with commercial software. In some cases (Mozilla, Linux, Apache) it does that very well. In some cases (Chandler, evidently) it does not. But not all F/OSS software is designed to be competitive to, replace, or be the equivalent of some commercial package.
I work on an Open Source CMS package. I've worked on the core, and I write a lot of add-in modules. I do it because 1) I like doing it, 2) it's a package that meets my needs and works in a way that's intuitive to me, 3) it serves as a framework for when I want to build custom solutions, and 4) I like the idea of collaborative work and contributing to the community.
Tens of thousands of people have downloaded my code, presumably some of them use it. Is it perfect for all of them? Judging by the number of feature requests and bug reports I get sent daily, it's anything but! Some of the feature requests I add to my list of things to implement, some I don't. Same with bug reports. Sometimes, I say that I have no intention to add a feature, but if someone wants to sponsor it, I'll add it for pay. Sometimes, I'll point out where in the code they would need to do work to implement the feature.
They're getting my work for free. I spend many hours each week helping people track down problems, consulting, frequently fixing *their* mistakes, all gratis. If some user feels entitled to *demand* his pet features, screw him! I can't tell you how many emails I get saying "I need feature X by next week, otherwise I won't use your product! Any anyway, Product Z already has that!" Hey, don't let the door hit you on the way out. Hope you find Product Z rewarding.
If this is being arrogant, or throwing back in people's faces, so be it. I produce something that I'm proud of. I honestly feel that I help make the world a better place (especially when I see nonprofits using my work to help publicize disease-prevention information or fight for social justice). But beyond that, I'm helping empower small-time web designers in the creation of feature-rich, standards-complaint web sites.
/rant off
@16: But beyond that, I'm helping empower small-time web designers in the creation of feature-rich, standards-complaint web sites.
You seem to be in a product category where FOSS excels naturally, since the primary audience for a web/server-based product tend to have great technical skill and don't mind performing some customization for their users.
OTOH, Chandler is a PIM installed on the desktop and has to work on an individual level out of the box. The audience focus for this type of app is miles away from 'Apache, Linux, MySQL' or even a typical CMS, so the comparison isn't apt.
@17:
Think of Use Cases as the part of functional requirements that keeps drawing developer attention back to the end-users; every requirement starts out phrased as a user situation. IMO an essential part of maintaining the "true vision" thing.
Why is this turning into a general pro/anti FOSS debate? Many people (myself included) have had a bad experience with Chandler - one particular F/OSS project. That doesn't say anything about open-source in general - except that, like any other projects, open-source projects can go wrong.
It's a shame that Chandler ending up sinking a lot of time and money into something that never got anywhere - but that doesn't mean FOSS in general is doomed.