about

three wishes for chandler development

  1. go mobile, in one way or another. connecting to the hub on a mobile device is close, but not cigar. look out for iphone. can the ical app on iphone interact with chandler, ie syncing with the chandler hub? or perhaps a third party application for iphone? it’s difficult though, considering that there already is ical.
  2. learn from claris organizer (which became ical). features such as contacts, ability to attach contacts/appointments into an existing appointment, including the ability to search for associating contacts for a particular appointment. kudos to benjamin wilreker for his innovative contact management in chandler to date.
  3. learn from the calendar in nokia s60: it’s fantastic to have your upcoming appointments and tasks (with alarms) in your pocket, immediately at your sight and editable when you grab your phone.

or is it already too late to pull it all together? not having contributed to the project, i feel uneasy critisizing, but i hope chandler will reach beta status within 2008. at the moment it still hasn’t found its niche, nor is it usable enough.

chandler and mobility

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?