I see no requirement for IMAP client and Chandler Desktop to be on the same computer.
IMAP client at computer A communicates a user-initiated move of a message to one of three Chandler Desktop-specific IMAP mailboxes.
Chandler Desktop at computer B performs a one-time download from those three mailboxes.
early adopter, metrotechnicals as experimental email users
One-time download of new mail from IMAP
Basic message composition
Required features for supporting collaboration workflows
Reply, reply all, forward
Send and receive
rich text editing
draft, queued, sent, read, unread, needs reply, replied to, forwarded
email status column
Email threading support
overall clustering solution
stamping communications workflows
Features not targeted for 1.0
Drag and drop emails and attachments from other email clients
A most remarkable omission from the reviews on Amazon (and presumably, from the book) is: discussion of standards, such as those relating to CalDAV.
OSAF/Chandler Project members made significant contributions to the drafting and setting of standards.
Happily, we don't hear companies such as Apple or Google criticising Chandler Project history whilst embracing/enjoying CalDAV. I suspect that - however well written the book may be - a *focus* on a space in time (however short or long) has overlooked the broader value of the Project.
"Our civilization runs on software. Yet the art of creating it continues to be a dark mystery, even to the experts, and the greater our ambitions, the more spectacularly we seem to fail. … [this book] sets out to understand why, through the story of one software project -- Mitch Kapor's Chandler, an ambitious, open-source effort…
Information is the substance of their work and more information is the output of their work: Research, proposals, priorities, direction and decisions?
knowledge is gained and shared
how people actually work
(too) many interesting things
There's something wrong with the way data
doesn't flow between the tools we use to manage, process, organize our information
software should be modeled around information
technological barriers
too much copying and pasting
false assumption that information management tasks are binary
false assumption underlying most productivity software that information and the organizational structures needed to manage that information are essentially static
A lone email languishes for a long time in your Inbox and then all of a sudden, blooms into an unending thread which dies down
the thread is revived and mushrooms into a full scale project
I tend to find myself involved in: at one extreme, very many varied small tasks, which are recorded/archived then intentionally forgotten; and at the other extreme: projects about which thought extends months or even years later. Between the two extremes: for me, things are hazy.
the same workflow hiccups show up again and again
an information management environment with built-in workflows that mirror what people hack together
three basic workflows everybody seems to construct for themselves, regardless of what tools they use
varying degrees of complexity and automation
These three workflows however, need to exist independently of each other
no complicated rule-builder
push-button interface
always assume a need for iteration and change over time
Peeling the Onion
Allow Organization to Change and Flow
the entire gamut of organizational affordances
Tagging
Filing, Rules, et cetera
won't ever be asked to decide between them
turn it into a Custom Attribute
Add semantics to a Tag
Custom Attribute
Drag a Tag or a Cluster to the sidebar
a Cluster: a way to thread items together, a way to reflect dependencies
Group collaboration systems exist in parallel with personal communication tools
does not scale down to work for small groups
the majority of the significant emails we send are sent while still in a draft-state
by modeling the user experience around how people work today and the substance of that work, we can be more than just another software tool and instead aspire to be a system for information management: A smarter way to work. A better environment for collaboration
We want Chandler to be able to talk to other applications
As we make Chandler's end-user information model richer, the number of interesting applications to talk to will increase. This is one of the many areas where we hope that people in the community will help increase Chandler's ability to talk to other applications