What's new in Chandler 0.4

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

An enormous amount of work has gone into Chandler between the 0.3 and 0.4 releases. Much of this work is not visible because it is infrastructure that the user interface does not yet harness or that just doesn't look any different. This includes work on full-text indexing, the Chandler Presentation and Interaction Architecture (CPIA), performance improvements, sophisticated handling of collections, improvements in the build system, and upgrades to new versions of libraries (particularly to wxWidgets 2.5.2.9).

Improvements

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

• Email: Chandler can now send and receive email messages, either with or without transport-level encryption and authentication. The "In", "Out", and "EmailView" Views show email messages. See ZeroPointFourEmailSummary for more technical details.
• Stamping: Users are able to "stamp" content items to change their properties -- what users would normally think of as the item's "type". Users can add Task, Email, or Calendar properties to any Task, Email, Calendar, or Note item. For example, if an email message arrives reminding you to go to the dentist on Monday at 10 AM, you can "stamp" it as a Calendar Item. The message will then show up on the calendar.
• Sharing via WebDAV: OSAF concluded that peer-to-peer infrastructure was not able to give us robust sharing of the form that we wanted, so we have switched to using a WebDAV server to mediate in sharing transactions. To use sharing, you will need to set your preferences as described in ZeroPointFourPreferences.
• Views: There are now additional views (available from the Test menu) for Tasks, Notes, "All", and "Mixed", as well as some example parcels. "All" shows all content items (Email, Task, Calendar, and Note Items) while "Mixed" shows all content items and all Contacts.
• Mini-calendar: There is now a small month-view calendar in the sidebar.
• Examples: There is now a stock quote demo and a CPIA block demo.
• Look and Feel: The user interface, while not finalized, has improved.

Removals

In the next few releases, we plan on focusing most of our effort into getting the calendar component of Chandler to a point where OSAF could use it on a day-to-day basis internally.

• ZaoBao, our RSS parcel, is not active in this release. (The RSS-specific code is still in the code tree.)
• MrMenus and Timeclock, two example parcels, have been removed.

More detailed information available in HISTORY.txt, which is in the Chandler distributions and in CVS at

• http://cvs.osafoundation.org/viewcvs.cgi/chandler/HISTORY.txt?rev=1.31&content-type=text/vnd.viewcvs-markup

Future directions

For more on our long-term plans, see

• ZeroPointFivePlanning
• ZeroPointSixPlanningOld^?

-- DuckySherwood - 08 Oct 2004