Dogfooding Chandler

A placeholder for collecting notes as I use Chandler in March. I plan on sending feedback to the list on April 7.

Setup

• I subscribed to the PPD calendar (read/write), which includes shared tasks, as "not mine"
• I subscribed to Ted's calendar (read-only), as "not mine"

Pain Points

• Looking at a recurring event in the table, I have no clue what day-of-the-week the event is on. It would be cool if the detail view reflected that somehow.
• The PPD calendar and my Work calendar had the same recurring event. I got confused when trying to delete the one that was originally on my work calendar (because I had already added the PPD one to my work calendar). Possible suggestion: the "do you want to delete" recurring dialog could have more information about the event you are deleting. If you are deleting all events, when did they start? What is the last future event that I am deleting?
• I keep creating new events events in the "office calendar" instead of my "work calendar". oops. Will try to be reflective about why that happens.
• Performance continues to be a problem, probably the biggest problem. Sharing performance has now been a problem for me as well -- I'm reluctant to sync and thus don't update my calendar enough.
• "Uploading" is confusing terminology -- does this mean events going into my desktop calendar or events going to the server?
• Pasting a link into the body of a recurring event is oddly slow.
• I often find myself creating two items, because I double click and don't see any effect right away.
• After I "remove" an item from the last collection, I don't think I want to see it in the detail view.

Good Points

• Other people have looked at my calendar and used that information to propose a meeting time (out of band).
• I used "anytime" events for the first time -- to create recurring tasks on my calendars
• I created a few recurring "tasks" on my calendar, for weekly tasks that I sometimes forget (meeting reminder, weekly rollup).

Wish List

• I'd like to see more events in the mini-preview area.
• For any meeting that uses the conference bridge, it would be cool to have the phone # immediately available.
• For any meeting that is a 1:1 with someone, it would be cool to have their phone # immediately available (these are often phone or skype meetings for me).

Observations

• I want to see the office calendar all the time, even though it is "not mine". I only want to see the calendars of Ted, Sheila, etc. occasionally (free busy use case, or other planning use cases). The shared office calendar is a very reasonable aggregation of the information I want to see all the time about everyone: pto and shared meetings but not everyone's daily meetings.

• I don't really want to see "shared" tasks that belong to others on the calendar. For example, we're sharing the PPD calendar, and Mimi has a "write summary" task entered on the calendar. I do want to see that task when looking at a list of tasks, but I don't think I want to see that task on the calendar. I suppose I could want to see tasks of other people on the calendar on rare occasions. Perhaps what I am saying is that tasks don't need to be part of free-busy information. We could get really fancy, and only show tasks on a shared calendar if they are "owned" by "me".