What's new in Chandler 0.5

A great deal of work has gone into Chandler between the 0.4 and 0.5 releases. Most of the visible work focusses on enhancing the calendar to support basic day-to-day individual and collaborative calendaring tasks. Much of the work that you cannot see involves infrastructure improvements or support for functionality that does not yet have a UI in place. This includes further work on the Chandler Presentation and Interaction Architecture (CPIA), performance improvements, support for email attachments, a new sharing architecture, a webDAV access control client library and upgrades to new versions of libraries (particularly to wxWidgets 2.5.3.1). We also made significant strides in development platform support.

Improvements

Here are a few of the features that are visible to end-users:

• Sidebar: The 4 kind filters (All, Mail, Events and Tasks) available in 0.4 have been promoted to the application toolbar on the far left side. We have also made a number of infrastructure changes to better handle item collection and views.
• Calendar: Users can navigate to the Calendar directly using the Mini Calendar or the Events button on the toolbar as well as review past and upcoming events on a weekly or daily granularity. They can create all day, anytime, specific time events or scheduled tasks. We support in-place creating and editing as well as the ability to set alarms. The user can also print the calendar week or day view.
• Calendar Import/Export: Using the File menu you can experimentally import and export calendars in iCalendar format.
• Sharing via WebDAV: We have made significant improvements to our sharing architecture in order to improve performance and support future feature and interoperability goals. We have also made a number of modifications to the webDAV account setup for 0.5. By default, users can choose from 3 predefined accounts or add their own. More details are described in ZeroPointFivePreferences.
• Developer Platform: Developers interested in writing simple parcels (form based parcels that introduce new data types) can look at our overview paper BuildingChandlerParcels (given at PyCon 2005) and the ZaoBao tutorial ZaoBaoTutorial to get started.
• Look and Feel: Although still in progress, some incremental improvements have been made to the UI.

Removals

You may notice that some of the menu items, especially under the Test menu have been removed. We decided to do a menu-cleanup for 0.5 and remove a number of items that were not working or no longer needed. You may see some of these reappear in later releases.

Future directions

For more on our long-term plans, see

• ZeroPointSixPlanningOld^?
• DesktopZeroDotSeven