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What is 0.6?

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Chandler 0.6 is a significant milestone for us here at OSAF. We are delivering experimentally usable software into the hands of users for the first time. This will hopefully allow us to start building an active user community as well as collect valuable feedback as people start to use the product on a day-to-day basis.

We defined experimentally usable calendar in terms of what it would take to get everyone at OSAF to start using the Chandler calendar, either for personal calendaring or collaborative group calendaring. This meant, not only making sure we had the right set of features, but also required significant investment in UI polish and performance. We have also made significant inroads into interoperability by supporting read-only and read-write sharing using our open source CALDAV server, Cosmo.

Although our focus in 0.6 was calendaring, we continued to make progress on other important areas of the application: developer platform productivity, i18n, accessibility and expressing Chandler's unique information architecture in the UI to name just a few.

We've built an infrastructure to use localized strings and dates in the UI. We've done significant research into accessibility guidelines and keyboard support. We're addressed key problem areas in the content model and developed a Python schema API. To boost our own productivity, we've also built a testing framework to create and run test scripts against Chandler.

See next sections for further details...

Release Tenets

The following are the primary principles by which we prioritized feature work for 0.6.

• Usable Calendar
  • We want to be able to use the calendar day-to-day at OSAF
• Polished UI
  • Polishing the ui will help calendar usability. We'll polish other areas of the application as well.
• Infrastructure Investment
  • We're going to invest in some projects for developer and qa productivity. We want Chandler to be testable, high quality source code.
  • We're going to continue to make some investments on email and internationalization.
• Developer Platform
  • A python programmer new to the project should be able to develop a Flickr-like parcel without someone from OSAF in the room.

Calendar

This release builds on our current infrastructure to support individual and collaborative calendaring tasks for small workgroups. In 0.6, you should be able to...

• Get data into Chandler
  • Import/export existing iCalendar files.
• Create, edit and delete Calendar events.
  • Events can be created using the menus or by double-clicking in place on the calendar.
  • Edit events in the detail view or in-place on the calendar.
  • Drag events around the calendar or add them to a different calendar. Manage a single event across multiple calendars.
  • Create all-day, multi-day or anytime events. Anytime events are unique to Chandler and allow the user to differentiate between all-day events and events scheduled for a certain date, but don't actually take up any time. (ie. call Mom, Pay rent, Dad's birthday).
  • Create an @time event, an event with a start time and no duration (ie: I need to meet someone at 3:00pm but don't know how long I will be).
• Create and manage multiple calendars.
  • Create a new calendars from the menus.
  • Import an existing calendar into Chandler.
  • Change the color of a calendar.
  • Change the color of a calendar from the menus.
  • Overlay multiple calendars.
• Recurrence
  • Create daily, weekly, monthly or bi-weekly recurring events.
  • Modify events within the recurring series.
  • Import calendars with basic and custom recurrence.
• Time-zones
  • Change the time-zone of the calendar view.
  • Assign a different time-zone to a single event.
  • Import calendars with time-zone information
• Navigate between the week and day views.
• Browse the calendar using the mini-calendar.
• Expand the mini-calendar to display multiple months at a time.
• Preview Today's events on the mini-calendar.
• Use the mini-calendar busy bars to get a high-level view of your calendar.
• Collaboration
  • Collaborate on a shared individual calendar, allowing multiple authors to read, create and edit events on the shared calendar.
  • Publish a read only calendar for multiple viewers.

Backing up Data

Users should back up their calendar data on a regular basis since the Chandler repository may be deleted if you install new versions of Chandler in the future. You can do this by selecting File->Import/Export->Export Events as iCalendar. If you are managing multiple calendars, you will need to export each calendar individually by selecting it in the sidebar and choosing Export Events as iCalendar.

Likewise, choose File->Import/Export->Import iCalendar Data for importing iCalendar files into Chandler. Likewise, you will need to import multiple files if you are managing multiple calendars. Upon import, the user is given the option to import into an existing calendar or create a new one.

Sharing

In 0.6, we have extended sharing so that users can share read-only and read-write calendars using our open source CALDAV server, Cosmo. This is implemented by generating URL tickets, one for read-only sharing and a second for read-write sharing. All sharees will access the share with the same read-write or read-only URL. Once created, these URLs can be passed around to anyone.

Using the menu item under the Collection menu, users can publish and subscribe to calendar URLs. Once a share has been published or subscribed to, we also support the ability to unpublish shares and retrieve both sharing URLs using the menu items or the Manage Share dialog. If upgrading to a new version of Chandler has deleted your current repository, use the "Collection>>Restore previous shares" menu item to re-establish previous shares.

We have optimized the 0.6 workflows to run against our public server but in theory, users should be able to share with other WebDAV and CALDAV servers. We also support the ability to share read-only calendars with non-Chandler users via Apple iCal. As a part of our interoperability goals, we encourage users to try sharing with other servers and report any issues/bugs they encounter. Details on how to do this can be found on the "How to give us feedback page" http://chandler.osafoundation.org/giveusfeedback.php.

Although Cosmo-Demo is publicly available, it's usage for 0.6 is still highly experimental. We also encourage users to report problems since it will help us both scale and stabilize Cosmo going forward. Cosmo-Demo should not be relied upon as a backup mechanism and users are responsible for backing up their data as described in the above section. It's possible that incremental improvements or patches to Cosmo will force us to wipe out the data on the server requiring users to re-setup their accounts and shares.

In order to share, you first need to setup an account on the Cosmo server. In Chandler, go to File->Accounts. From the Accounts dialog, select Sharing account from the list of accounts on the left. A default account has been setup for you which points to our public server, Cosmo-Demo. Click on the Sign up for an account button to create a username and password on the server. Then come back to the Accounts dialog to fill in your account information. Make sure to include the path to your account: home/username.

Alternatively, you can go directly to the server signup page at...

https://cosmo-demo.osafoundation.org/account/new

If you have your own WebDAV server, you can add this account by clicking on the "Create new account" drop-down and selecting "Sharing WebDAV". You can of course setup your own version of Cosmo as well. To find out more about the Cosmo project, go to the home page...

http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Projects/CosmoHome

Known Major Bugs

Although we want to see users experimenting with the calendar, it is not without some bugs. I full list of known issues can be found at...

• http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Chandler/ZeroPointSixKnownMajorBugs