chandler as dogfood

Steps to set up

• iCal on mac: Exported 3 calendars from: Home, Work, and Travel (train time)
• mac Thunderbird: Mailed the 3 calendars to myself
• Downloaded 0.6.1 on mac and home pc
• pc Chandler: Imported 3 calendars as separate collections
• pc Chandler: Picked colors that matched the colors I was using in iCal
• pc Chandler: Subscribed to office calendar (after finding ticket in mail that sheila sent)
• Cosmo-demo: Spent 20 minutes dorking with trying to remember cosmo account and password, or get it mailed to me
• Cosmo-demo: Created new cosmo account instead
• pc Chandler: Set up sharing account
• pc Chandler: Generated tickets for all 3 calendars
• pc Notepad: Pasted tickets into one note (windows notepad)
• pc Thunderbird: Mailed the note to myself
• mac Chandler: subscribed to office calendar (getting tickets from email)
• mac Chandler: subscribed to my calendars (getting tickets from email)
• mac Chandler: Picked colors to be consistent with pc
• pc Thunderbird: sent email to husband with 3 read only tickets and chandler download link

Observations

• I'm trying to use Chandler sharing over cosmo as a way to have synchronized calendars across the multiple computers I use every day, which is not exactly our target use case. I do something analogous with Thunderbird: I have clients on 3 machines. Having the app be consistent across platforms is useful.

• The whole process involved jumping in and out of a lot of applications, which was sort of distracting. Some of this is unavoidable in the short term, but we might be able to do some easy things to reduce it.

• In a way, tickets worked quite nicely. Ticket management was a little painful going through the workflows of creating the ticket, but not as the person receiving the ticket.

• The share dialog was a little confusing -- particularly the placement of the "sign up for account" button. Was I supposed to hit that button after filling in the information? Would that button help me fill in the information? How did that button relate to the account fields? Was it recommended that I test the account?

• I really like the ability to put an item from the office calendar onto one of "my" calendars.

• I frequently look at the iCal icon in the doc to see what "today"'s date is.

Possible improvements

• Cosmo-demo could send you email with the tickets when you generate them. (Security problem? Well, I end up mailing them around anyway).
• Alternatively, Chandler save a note item with the tickets in the body. That would allow you to stamp it as an email and send it to someone.
• Cosmo-demo could send you email when you create an account -- welcome, yadayada perhaps with username.
• The "sign up for account" button in the Chandler accounts dialog could be placed away from the input fields, so as not to suggest that the button will fill them in directly or that it should be clicked after filling in the information.
• It would be cool if you could share multiple collections at once, generating one set of tickets. (Or go ahead and generate multiple tickets, but one step through the workflow).
• I would have found it useful to share color along with the collection, as an option.
• Make today's date clear at a glance by replacing "today" with "Jan 3" or whatever in the minical. (As mimi points out, also more localizable).