I've been playing a lot with Chandler for the first time to get a general feel for where things are. This is a summary of my real-time, unfiltered thoughts. I understand many of the issues I have noted were never slated to be resolved in 0.5. They are merely here as cues about what we might want to prioritize in 0.6 work.

These represent quick impressions. I am not trying to isolate bugs per se. Developers should feel free to check with me directly for more info. If I feel strongly about some particular experience, I will go through normal channels to validate the problem behavior and file a bug.

The biggest news is that I was able to successfully import my actual calendar, 3000 events going back to 2003 into the 0.5 pre-release builds on both Mac and Windows. I exported my Apple iCal calendar to a .ics file to and used Chandler's file import. This is impressive! When the client is developed enough to handle, even minimally, large data sets, you know it's made a lot of progress. I was able to view the calendar in a table as well as in the week view. I gave several demos at PC Forum of this (privately) and people were duly impressed.

I was also able to subscribe to two RSS feeds and update them. Yay! Pretty clearly, I started to want a whole bunch more features in the newsreader.

With this amount of data in the calendar, performance was sluggish to slow to really slow, depending on the particulars. As usual, the Windows XP version was consistently a lot faster than the Mac. The import itself took many, many minutes, and I noticed the lack of feedback as to progress. Scrolling in table view was slow. Switching views was slow. Pretty much all operations were slow. The good news is that we now have a baseline of application performance from which we can devise plans of attack for optimization.

I was able to successfully subscribe to the OSAF office calendar, as published on .Mac. However, I didn't learn until later we are only getting the first ten instances of repeating events, so it was puzzling. I was not able to subscribe to my personal calendar. I would be happy to show what happens to the right developer, but basically it throws a big exception of some kind. I have not tried to experiment further to characterize the problem further.

Resizing the width of summary view takes several seconds.

After setting up email account info, it took 30 seconds to respond after I tried to create a new mail message. XP version.

Status line prompts persist long past point of usefulness. "downloaded 16 messages" hung around forever.

I'm unclear if I just want to sync my calendar if I have to have email account info set up. It certainly reminds me of it every time.

text entry bug in summary or detail view if type too fast, cursor wraps to begin of line. This has since been fixed

you can't edit font, size, emphasis of text. the default font in detail view is too small.

column titles in summary view need to be rationalized. having 2 labels per column doesn't work in its current form

rationalize icons in app bar and detail view (known)

columns should auto resize as you adjust width of summary view

the column head has grid lines, but the main part of summary view doesn't.

in and out are confusing labels for collections. Less emphasis should be drawn to the sending and receiving of events.

the calendar icon shouldn't be a clock but a calendar?

should be able minimally to drag an RSS feed into Zao Bao