Dogfooding Chandler

• I've been using Chandler for ~1 month.

Setup

• I'm still using 0.6.1 for my day to day calendar use.
• I tend to use it on my mac laptop every day, and only rarely on my windows desktop machines (home or office).
• I subscribe to the office calendar, and publish Home, Work, and Train calendars.
• I created a PyCon calendar (see below).
• Although several people have mailed me tickets to their work calendars, I have yet to set that up.
• I sent a read-only ticket to my work calendar around to a bunch of people, but I have no idea who is actually subscribed.

Pain points

• Chandler's performance is the biggest obstacle to my daily use. In particular, switching views and overlaying calendars is too slow. Ban the beach ball!
• Bug#5368 prevents me from seeing events from the office calendar that I added to my Work calendar in the preview pane -- I notice this as a problem every day.
• I get confused when I "uncheck" a calendar, unsure whether or not the computer has registered my click. I'd like instantaneous feedback that the calendar has indeed been unselected. This is partly a performance issue, but there might be more too it than just the collection being slow.
• Dragging items to the sidebar to add them to a second collection is kind of scary/painful. (a) there is a performance lag, so I'm not sure when the drag has started (b) I fear altering the date/time by dragging it around and not having land correctly. If I had a menu option, I'd use it. Ideally I could add it to collections from the detail view.

Good points

• I like the preview area showing today's events.
• I continue to like being able to take an event from a shared calendar and put it onto my work calendar (making it "mine").
• I like having some calendars be "mine" and some calendars be "not mine".
• I like the app being colorful, and I like having each calendar be color coded.

Wish List

• I'd like to know who subscribed to the PyCon calendar, and to my Work calendar. Just knowing # of subscribers would be interesting all by itself.

PyCon

• I imported the PyCon ics calendar into Chandler, and published it. I used the calendar for choosing events at PyCon, and updated a session or two when more information was available. Sharing updates at the conference was sort of a non-starter, because the wireless access was so bad. Sharing being a bit slow is also a problem (although honestly, the slowness of switching views and doing overlays is more of a problem).
• When I imported the PyCon calendar, I wanted to import it as "not mine", which wasn't an option. Presumably it would be good to unify subscription and import dialogs.
• I added certain conference events to my Work calendar, which worked nicely for figuring out what was next at a glance. (And it would have worked even better if Bug#5368 was fixed).
• Because the PyCon calendar had so many events, I had to use the day view for it to be useful.
• PyCon crossed a week boundary (Friday -- Tuesday), so it was a little awkward going back and forth from week to week. In this (admittedly rare) case, it would have been cool to see these 5 days at a glance.
• I would have liked to freely overlay and then stop overlaying the PyCon events, but performance made this painful.
• Now that PyCon2006 is over, I don't need the collection in my sidebar. I don't want to lose the events from the "soup" though -- would be nice to have a way to do this.
• I used the timezone features, setting to central time. I didn't really notice them during the conference, which I take to be a good sign -- seamless and not getting in my way.

Screenshots