Chandler is a discontinued

personal information management Personal information management (PIM) is the study of the activities people perform in order to acquire or create, store, organize, maintain, retrieve, and use information items such as documents (paper-based and digital), web pages, and email mes ...

software suite described by its developers as a "Note-to-Self Organizer" designed for personal and small-group task management and calendaring. It is

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...

, previously released under the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general ...

, and now released under the Apache License 2.0. It is inspired by a PIM from the 1980s called

Lotus Agenda Agenda is a DOS-based personal information manager, designed by Mitch Kapor, Ed Belove and Jerry Kaplan, and marketed by Lotus Software. Lotus Agenda is a "free-form" information manager: the information need not be structured at all before it ...

, notable because of its "free-form" approach to information management. Lead developer of Agenda, Mitch Kapor, was also involved in the vision and management of Chandler. Chandler consists of a cross-platform desktop application (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux), the Chandler Hub Sharing Service, Chandler Server, Chandler Quick Entry for iPhone, and Chandler Quick Entry for Android. Version 1.0 of the software was released on August 8, 2008. Chandler was developed by the

Open Source Applications Foundation The Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF) was a non-profit organization founded in 2002 by Mitch Kapor whose purpose was to effect widespread adoption of free software/open-source software. History Founded in 2002 by Mitch Kapor to effec ...

(''OSAF''). It is named after the mystery novelist Raymond Chandler.

Chandler design goals

Chandler aimed to create a workflow for personal information management different from that in other PIMs. Its approach is mainly based in creating a unified representation for the storage of tasks and information so that they can be classified in a homogeneous way, refining that information through an iterative workflow, and allowing easy collaboration on the defined items. Other goals included: * Build on open source software that supports

open standards An open standard is a standard that is openly accessible and usable by anyone. It is also a prerequisite to use open license, non-discrimination and extensibility. Typically, anybody can participate in the development. There is no single definitio ...

, choosing projects that are reliable, well documented, and widely used * Use the Python language at the top level to orchestrate low level, higher performance code * Design a platform that supports an extensible modular architecture * For the desktop client, choose a cross-platform user interface toolkit that provides native user experience * Use a persistent

object database An object database or object-oriented database is a database management system in which information is represented in the form of objects as used in object-oriented programming. Object databases are different from relational databases which a ...

* Build in security from the ground up * Build an architecture that supports sharing, communication, and collaboration

Reception

The first public releases of Chandler generated expectations to provide a flexible and general information management tool, because of its heritage of concepts from Agenda and usage of principles from the

Getting Things Done ''Getting Things Done'' (GTD) is a personal productivity system developed by David Allen and published in a book of the same name. GTD is described as a time management system. Allen states "there is an inverse relationship between things on yo ...

management method. Early responses praised its open nature and its unified approach to management of different information types. Despite this, the lack of a stable version and the small developer base diminished public interest in the project. In January 2008, Mitch Kapor announced that he was leaving the board and would only finance Chandler until the end of 2008. After that, OSAF released a 1.0 version. Jake Edge from

LWN.net LWN.net is a computing webzine with an emphasis on free software and software for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. It consists of a weekly issue, separate stories which are published most days, and threaded discussion attached to ...

called this move a ''"last gasp attempt to build a community of users and developers to continue Chandler development down the road"'', speculating that the lack of developers was caused by the close control of the project by OSAF, and this end of its funding could attract attention again. There have been no releases since 2009.

In popular culture

Chandler is the subject of the non-fiction book '' Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software'' by Scott Rosenberg.

References

Citations

Sources

; Attribution * ''Portions of this article are taken from th
OSAF website
published under the Creative Commons Attribution License v2.0.''

External links

* * (bette
mirror
with all metadata, branches, and tags preserved on Gitlab) {{DEFAULTSORT:Chandler (Software) Free personal information managers Free software programmed in Python Personal information manager software for Linux Free calendaring software Software that uses wxPython 2008 software