Chandler 1.0, the open source PIM

Little noticed amid all the hubbub about Mobile Me, the App Store, iPhone killswitches and everything else, was the news from last week that Chandler 1.0 for OS X was finally released.

If that leaves you only fractionally less in the dark, here's some background: Chandler is a cross-platform, open source Personal Information Manager (PIM), and project of the Open Source Applications Foundation. The vision behind Chandler and the OSAF is that of Mitch Kapoor, designer of the original "killer app" for the PC generation, Lotus 1-2-3.

Chandler has been many years in gestation, but that's hardly surprising when you look at the feature set - there's a huge amount of stuff packed in there. The 3-minute guided tour (direct link to .mov file) is well worth watching for an overview.

The very first thing that catches my eye is the "Quick entry bar", which looks just like the search boxes you see in many other OS X apps like Mail and Safari. This one isn't just for search, though; it's also for rapid input. You type something, hit enter, and it instantly becomes a new item in Chandler for you to edit, expand on, and deal with later.

Chandler is a free download from chandlerproject.org. We'd be interested to hear what you make of it.

Via MacNetJournal

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Source: http://blog.chandlerproject.org/2008/08/08/chandler-10/

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Little noticed amid all the hubbub about Mobile Me, the App Store, iPhone killswitches and everything else, was the news from last week...

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doocoo

I've just read the book "Dreaming in Code". It's a novel about the development of this software, and how difficult those developers are.
this project start at 2002, but until 2008, they just realsed version 1.0......

August 26 2008 at 5:15 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Jeffrey Harris

Site should be up again now. Odd, that server's taken much higher loads than that in the past, but it was hung about 10PM Tuesday night. Sorry about that...

August 13 2008 at 2:06 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Catt

Site must have gotten hammered due to the TUAW nod because I can't get to it either and its Wednesday. Funny thing is that it was working for me yesterday at home but I wanted to download the Windows version.

August 13 2008 at 10:18 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

STSanford

Has anyone been able to hit the site? I haven't gotten anywhere, yesterday I could see the project page, but no downloads, not I can't even get that far.

August 13 2008 at 8:34 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

janeiro

in my opinion, the big deal for iCal users is Chandler Hub, which can act as a CalDAV repository for iCal. nice (and free) replacement for that component of Mobile.Me AND it supports read/write calendar sharing, something Mobile.Me doesn't (afaik).

August 12 2008 at 8:13 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Wheat Williams

Founder Mitch Kapor severed all ties and withdrew his funding from the OSAF and Chandler about a year ago, and they have been proceeding without him. Apparently he thought the project had lost its focus and was trying to be too many things to too many people. A lot of observers said that this was a death-knell for the project.

I haven't tried Chandler, but it certainly looks interesting and innovative. Since it's open-source, I hope it ends up being influential in the evolution of productivity software.

August 12 2008 at 4:58 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

frank landfield

cool

August 12 2008 at 11:08 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

frank landfield

very cool and helpful. thanks. peace.

August 12 2008 at 11:07 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Lerxst

One interesting thing about Chandler is that its creation (well, the first half of it at least) was documented on the best-selling book Dreaming in Code, it's a quite nice read for those into software development and FOSS.

August 12 2008 at 9:16 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply