Posted by
himath on November 12, 2008
As someone who plays multiple roles in life (including many roles at work), for some time, I have been trying to find the ideal productivity tool. Having experimented with many such tools, I am yet to find the perfect solution. However, the good news is that Chandler 1.0 has finally been released. Today I downloaded and installed Chandler 1.0.2 for Linux on my laptop running Ubuntu 8.04.
Chandler is an open source note to self organizer which I had previously tested a few months back only to find that its performance was inadequate for my purposes. I also sometimes ran into bugs that made it unusable. So far, I have been able to use 1.0.2 without any major issue. Performance has been acceptable, but the real test is when I use it for about a week and enter 100s of records. As an advocate of open source software, I hope the product has finally become usable.
Apart from Chandler, I have used two other excellent productivity tools. Both are hosted services that you can access over the Internet. One is Remember the Milk which has a great way to manage lists. The tagging is also quite powerful. The other is Todoist which can have any number of levels in a task hierarchy making it well suited for managing projects.
Getting started with Chandler on Ubuntu
The binary available on Chandler website was built for Ubuntu 7.10. However with the help of a discussion thread, I managed to get Chandler 1.0.2 installed on Ubuntu 8.04.
Related Posts: Dreaming in Code, Don’t Worry be Crappy, Building Software - Engineering or Art?
Posted by
himath on November 8, 2008
Last summer when I was completing my masters at Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley, I took the Open Source course as an elective. In one of our projects, we had to investigate Open Source productivity tools. That was when I stumbled upon Chandler. 
Although I liked the product and its features, I found Chandler to be slow and unstable. With increased amounts of data, its performance reduced, and became increasingly difficult to use.
While investigating Chandler, I learned about a book titled “Dreaming in Code” by Scott Rosenberg, which was written with the Chandler project as its setting. A few weeks later, when I was early for an appointment, and was killing time in a bookshop in Mountain View, the book caught my eye, and buying it was the most natural thing to do.
The book is the result of an exercise (where Chandler was chosen as the example) to investigate why it’s so hard to build software. One does not need any background knowledge about the software industry to understand this book, as the author explains the history and concepts behind the topics being discussed. I would recommend the book to anyone who wants to get a high level understanding about what building software is like today.
From what I have read so far, it seems that Chandler started with lofty goals, but an unclear vision. The project had weak processes at the beginning. This resulted in a project with ever extending targets for releasing, which seems to be a common problem in the software industry.
