Wed, 18 Jan 2006

Trying Chandler

I downloaded and installed Chandler yesterday, and copied over my (few) appointments to try it out. I only use evolution for its calendar, and I've left it running as well so that I can more easily compare the two side-by-side.

Chandler installed easily -- the FC2 RPM installed without hitch on my FC4 box. There's no .desktop file for it, so I ended up making one of my own... in general its Gnome desktop integration is weak at the moment. The install is big, but then they do package their own copy of Python in there -- a typical (and sane) ISV approach, but still a little unfortunate.

Chandler is definitely prettier than evolution. It shows my events in color with a nice (but by now almost standard) gradient effect. The icon for Chandler is also beautiful, though again in a somewhat standard way. You can see this stuff on the main Chandler page.

Chandler does fix one evolution bug that has bothered me. So far they are doing well on the little details like these, especially when you consider that this is a pre-1.0 release. Also, they have been very responsive on my bug reports -- big plus to them!

It seems more memory-hungry than Evolution, that's a minus.

I didn't try any of the sharing stuff. Unfortunately for Chandler my calendaring needs are quite modest at the moment.

I frequently wonder about the rationale behind writing Chandler. It is nicer than Evolution in some ways, but surely not enough to justify writing an entirely new application. Is it really about the cross-platform-ness of it? As in, success looks like Mozilla, having users across the platform spectrum? I haven't found a really straight answer to this, and I missed a chance to ask it directly at OSCON.

Cosmo

The OSAF is also working on Cosmo, a calendar server. This is an area I've never really looked into; I seem to remember hearing a lot of complaints about the lack of this in the past, but now there seem to be a few of these around. Maybe someone out there knows what they are and how to compare them?

posted at: 17:26 | path: /software | permanent link to this entry