All Hands Meeting - July 22, 2004

There were no announcements, but lots of demos.

Demos

Jed - various

Jed demoed

• Receiving email in Chandler and displaying it in a View.
• Multiple views per sidebar collection, as shown by the calendar: the user can see Calendar events in list, month, week or day view.
• Creating a new (empty) collection and populating it.

There were still some bugs to be worked out, which we will be working on before demo-ing at OSCON next week.

Morgen - parcels

Morgen first demoed parcel reloading. This allows developers to alter the XML of a parcel and reload it without stopping Chandler and restarting from scratch.

Morgen also showed something he did as a hobby project in only a few hours of his copious spare time. In order to put up a photo blog, Morgen leveraged the vast capabilities of Twisted to write a webserver parcel and a python servlet to serve his photos. He demoed Chandler running on his personal computer in Fremont, manipulating the XML, reloading the parcel in Chandler, and then viewing the change on his blog.

Donn - stamping

Each item in Chandler is a certain Kind (task, mail, calendar item) and by stamping it, we can change its Kind to another (mail to task, task to calendar, etc.) A lot of this work was done on the Repository side by Andi, so that Items retain their UUID in the repository, even as they change their Kind in the UI. Donn showed how stamping an email message as a Task made it show up in the Task list.

Mitch said that the whole idea of stamping came from Mimi and the Design Group, and it was an architectural challenge to figure out how to make it work. Now that we have the underlying mechanism to support this stamping concept, other stamping related features will show up throughout the UI. The next step is to figure out how to make stamping useful in a natural way. If we succeed, this will be a distinguishing feature of Chandler and will go a long way of solving the well known "silo" problem of PIMs.

Celebrations

Mitch congratulated all of the teams on meeting their Integration Point A goals.

-- EstherSun and DuckySherwood - 23 Jul 2004