Alpha 4 Detailed Work Plan

As with Alpha 3, this is a detailed summary of all the deliverables we plan to have by the end of Alpha4. Unlike previous alphas, some of this work will start during the Alpha3 timeframe and be partially completely when Alpha3 ships. It's important to note however, that these items are not considered as blockers to releasing Alpha3. This plan is based both on our original phasing proposals, new information we have received from dogfooders as well as changes we feel are necessary as a result of the longer term planning work that is ongoing for 1.0.

For a complete list of all tasks and bugs, see Tasks and Bugs

Alpha4 Goals

At a high level, this feature list will attempt to satisfy the following high-level usage scenarios.

• Plausible Dashboard

Accomplishing both of these goals really involves building out the enough of the dashboard so users can experiment with it. This centers around getting both stamping and the triage infrastructure working correctly by tackling alot of domain model work. It is also assumed we will be continuing to agressively tackle and prioritize performance work across all areas of the application. We will not attempt to have ALL the dashboard and stamping work done but enough to provide a proof of concept and get some real user feedback.

Dogfood Calendar

• Calendar top priorities:
  • Restore a user's sharing world view after deleting repository
    • Add the ability to restore shares and settings when we run Chandler with a new repository.
  • New calendar lozenges
    • New lozenge colors
    • Matching colors in sidebar icons

• Other work items:
  • Sidebar and virtuality improvements
    • No overlays for OOTB collections
    • Divider between OOTB and user-defined collections
  • High priority dogfood calendar bugs as prioritized at: Dogfood bugs
    • Bug#4635 - App bar doesn't show recurring events that are stamped.
    • Bug#5407 - Alarms should pop up when Chandler is not running - Alpha4 goal is for the technical discussion and proposal ONLY
    • Bug#5325 - More user friendly way for subscribing to Chandler calendar in iCal (https no longer supported).
    • Bug#5415 - Can't resubcribe to my shares once Chandler dies.
    • Other bugs that were deferred from Alpha2 and potentially Alpha3.
  • Consolidate some of the collection menu items to facilitate sharing management.
  • Fixes to preview pane and mini cal.
  • Dump and reload - data migration strategy (continued progress)
  • Magic sharing URL - something that Cosmo UI users can click on to subscribe

Scheduling and free-busy

• Free-busy:
  • Generate free-busy view using CALDAV reports

• Stamping UI
  • Decouple from/to from email
  • Sending updates between Chandler-Chandler users
  • Make attachments send to Chandler using other email clients show up as Chandler events.
  • Detail view expandos/auto-complete

Dashboard

• Top priorities:
  • Change name of My collections to Dashboard
  • Section by Triage status
  • Set Triage status in the detail view
  • Display Triage status with color and text in the table
  • Display proper triage status icon in the header.
  • Set custom-date Ticklers in the detail view
  • Display custom-date Tickler icon in the Reminder column
  • Auto-Triage Items to NOW (e.g. Newly created Items, when Ticklers and Event dates go off)
  • Sort Triage sections according to spec
  • Sort on the Task, Communications status and Reminder columns
  • Sub-sort on Triage status
  • Proper formatting and display of dates in the date column
  • Add Items to the Task list in the Task column

• Other items:
  • Search
    • Search box in Toolbar
  • Email
    • Reply, reply all, forward
  • Quick item entry
    • NLP date/time
  • Chandler as an IMAP server

Architecture/Platform

• Stamping architecture and design - based on spec
• Domain model - Infrastructure work to support features scheduled for alpha4 and later
  • User defined attributes
  • Labelling
  • Stamping
• Sharing format design
• What appears in what column domain model issues
• Talkback
• i18n community framework
• i18n Unit test framework
• Continued performance work

Build/Release

• Switch to Ubuntu as the officially supported Linux
• wx Tinderboxes and svn repository
• external and internal into dev branch, with separate Tinderboxes
• Move chandler testing and distribution building code out of hardhat/
• Get rid of RunChandler^? scripts
• Debug why installers suddenly got much bigger
• Compiler version check/update

-- SheilaMooney - 25 Apr 2006