for some years, i’ve been keeping track of chandler, an open source personal information manager. at the moment, it’s on the verge of becoming usable for me. i still miss claris organizer (1, 2), which i used as my calendar until 2001. since 2004 i’ve been using the built-in calendar of the n-gage, and now the n80ie.
i’ll get back to chandler in a moment, but first some points about my current pim.
- almost always carrying a device such as the n80ie gives me the possibility to immediately take note of whatever i need to, as well as being reminded of any task or meeting. this alone is enough for me to keep using the n80ie as my main and only pim.
- the drawbacks: the calendar is medieval, and i cannot synchronize it with chandler/my computer. i don’t quite like nokia, and i prefer open source, already using linux. also, chandler offer so much more.
there’s no point for me to keep two parallell calendars (chandler & n80ie); i can’t combine the mobility of n80ie with the features of chandler. sheila at the chandler project tells me that there is indeed some movement towards mobility. however, it seems the next step is focused upon notifications to mobile devices, which isn’t enough for me to abandon my current pim. i have to be able to quickly get a view of my calendar anywhere, anytime, and schedule a meeting or whatever on the spot. not even my otherwise valuable eee enables me to do that (too big to fit in my pocket, and too slow to get from shutdown to an open calendar).
the iphone comes with ical, which uses the same standard calendar format .icl, but i’m not sure to what extent it’s reasonable to expect chandler to work along with ical on the iphone specifically. on a larger note, i’m curious to see the prospects of chandler working at all on a mobile device. the openmoko device perhaps, eventually? maybe chandler could go the ubuntu way and develop a specific chandler mobile version, that could be syncronized with the chandler hub?
I fully agree. Chandler seems like a very promising way of keeping track of one’s tasks and calendars. The hub seems to be OK, but on a phone you need to have synchronization. A chandler App for S60 would with a high propability replace the lowsy PIMs that Nokia S60 devices have. An E90 with Chandler. Mmm….goood…. The N-series tablets just aren’t usable as phones (yet).
terve jarkko, thanks for you comment.
the problem with a chandler app for s60 is s60. in my opinion symbian is dead. however, at the moment it would indeed be quite convenient with a chandler app on e90!
too bad by the way that the nokia linux tablets didn’t come with an optional gsm module. i’m not too familiar with the reasons though, but i guess isp’s fear the combination of linux and gsm (think openmoko).