When I first began reporting on Chandler for Dreaming in Code at the very start of 2003, there was talk of shipping a 1.0 version within a year. Then, in following years, the project got so bogged down that at times it was hard to imagine it ever arriving at such a milestone.
Well, on Friday, the OSAF team released a 1.0 version of Chandler. At the moment I am too deep in the swamps of blog history circa 2001 to do full justice to this news, but must take note nonetheless.
Chandler, of course, is the personal-information-management application whose story sat at the center of my first book. I last checked in on the project at the start of this year, when OSAF and Kapor parted ways.
It’s been close to six years since Mitch Kapor first announced plans for Chandler, and the application today is quite different from what was envisioned then. But it does fulfill at least a portion of the ambitious agenda Kapor set: It’s fully cross-platform, and, from the user side, it takes a very flexible approach to data. The program was once positioned as a calendar with email and task capabilities, and it’s still got those features, but it’s now presented as a notebook program — it’s “The Note-To-Self Organizer.” You store information free-form and then can organize it according to now/later/done triaging, turn items into tasks and schedule them on the calendar, group data in multiple collections, and share it across the web via the Hub server. I’m looking forward to experimenting more with it.
The OSAF blog post announcement includes some more detail. And James Fallows has a good post up at the Atlantic.
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I just finished your book last week and thought it was interesting to start seeing references to Chandler in the news. Thanks for your work chronicling the development process.
When I saw the announcement that Chandler 1.0 had been released, I almost fell out of my chair—mostly because, after reading your excellent book, I came to believe that OSAF’s dog food would never reach supermarket shelves. That it finally did is a testament to all of the developers you profiled so insightfully.
Good luck with the new project!
Funny that Chandler 1.0 — something I’ve waited for for so long — snuffs the final breath out of my hopes of what it might be, when it arrives. This was supposed to be Agenda++ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Agenda). It’s sad. I’m nostalgic, again, for my HP 200LX, with it’s excellent clicky keyboard, it’s tiny monochrome screen, slowly running Agenda.
Thanks to Mitch for trying.
…to the deafening sound of silence….
The question was asked on Stackoverflow: “How can I apply David Allen’s Getting Things Done as a programmer.”
My answer pointed to Chandler, with references to your book that I just started reading a month ago, before I discovered Chandler now actually exists!
See my answer at: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/248159/how-can-i-apply-david-allens-getting-things-done-as-a-programmer#249199