The folks over at the OSAF have finally released a 1.0 release candidate for Chandler Desktop (Check out their blog post). For those of you that don’t know about Chandler - likely all of you - here is the description from their vision:
Chandler is an open source Note-to-Self Organizer. It features calendaring, task and note management and consists of a desktop application, web application and a free sharing and back-up service called Chandler Hub.
I’ve been following the project for a while and considered joining in on the development at some point. It’s a pretty cool project - the main bit I love is that you can get to pretty much all your information from the Dashboard screen.
However for me I find its still not quite the right fit - I think the developers have built what they intended but not what I wanted they’ll get there eventually :). My main complaint is that it doesn’t allow me to manage my email in the same interface. You can set up your email accounts - but chandler only displays email sent from Chandler or emails you copy in to special Chandler created IMAP folders.
I have yet to find a mail/calendar/task manager that can give me a work flow I really love - for now I’m settling for a combination of Gmail, Google Calendar, Thunderbird and Remember The Milk (aided by RTM for gmail). What I was hoping for from Chandler was a tool that could integrate all of these and enable the workflow where: email comes in -> create todo and/or calendar entry. Allowing me to find the original email from the todo events etc.
If someone wants to build this tool (or join me in doing so) let me know… however for now it appears I’ll still have to wait - maybe I can get close to what I want with plugins to Thunderbird and/or Firefox.
Note: Apologies - this came out as a bit of a rant even though that wasn’t intended. Oh well it is what it is.