Staff Meeting Notes 1 July 2004

Demonstrations

Security

Heikki showed how various security classes have been incorporated. From inside the Chandler repository, he inspected items of three different Kinds:

• CA, which holds information about a certificate authority
• Certificate, which holds information about certificates, including a fingerprint of the public key that someone can use to verify a key by some out-of-band mechanism (i.e. by saying it over the phone)
• PrivateKey, which holds information about the private key

There was some discussion about what form the fingerprint should be in; there was some thought that it ought to be syllabic to facilitate communicating over the phone. There was also a sense that the fingerprint wasn't needed for the "dogfood" release, an objection by IT, and a note that this was an issue to be resolved at a later date.

Item Collections

To establish some context, Stuart first showed how, from the Chandler UI, there was a calendar collection that was created by a rule/query. (Note: the queries are still "old-style", and only allow querying on the Kind of the Items. More powerful queries are coming.)

He then showed how the user could add and remove items from a collection. He added calendar items from the collection by dragging them onto a View's tab. Jed jumped in and walked Stuart through generating some random notes, and showed that users could even add Notes to the calendar event collection.

Internally, Item collections have a query, an inclusion list, and an exclusion list. Mitch talked about how important, cool, and novel it is to be able to include and exclude items from a collection.

John pointed out that the "who" column in the various tables of items was actually what was called a "redirecting attribute", which points to different things for different items. For example, for email items, "who" is the sender of the message, while for calendar events, "who" points to the participants in the meeting.

John also talked about how each attribute has a particular type of renderer and editor. This was required by the summary view, but will allow us to have editors all over the UI. In particular, this means not needing particular code to change how the "who" field is displayed. The "who" column display is completely data-driven.

There was some discussion about minutia of how cells will be displayed when the contents of the cell are longer than the cell width. At some point, we'd like to have the cell resize nicely the way HTML table cells do, but we aren't there yet.

Progress

Mitch noted that we're steadily marching milestone to milestone; that our forecasting at the two-week milestone level is getting better and better. We seem to be on track for the 0.4 release, and don't look like we're going to slip schedules or features much. He said that he felt we were realy turning a corner.

-- DuckySherwood - 02 Jul 2004