What's New in Chandler 0.7alpha2
What is alpha2 ?
The Chandler 0.7alpha2 milestone builds on the calendar we released in 0.6 by providing a sneak preview of some of the new features we are implementing for 0.7. A milestone release is not as stable as a full release, and we expected that current 0.6 and 0.6.1 users will be want to continue using the calendar with 0.6.1 for the time being. A list of known major bugs for this release is on the OSAF Projects Wiki.
The work in Alpha2 centers around three areas:
- Enhancing the calendar and fixing a number of problems reported by our users
- Introducing some light-weight scheduling workflows
- Focusing on the other areas of the PIM by building out the basic table features
New features in this version:
Take a look below at some screenshots of the Chandler 0.7 features that are making their initial appearance in 0.7alpha2. Remember that as we roll out new features, we don't expect them to be complete, robust, pretty, or bug-free, and the following are no exception. But they will give you an idea of what Chandler is going to be in the future. You are welcome to download the 0.7alpha2 milestone and try these out for yourself, but if you are using Chandler 0.6.1 to dogfood the Chandler calendar, you probably will want to hold off until alpha3 before you upgrade. If you do want to begin using the 0.7alpha2 milestone you should follow the instructions on the Chandler Project wiki for migrating your data from 0.6 to 0.7.
- Publish a Free/Busy version of your calendar
- Sort and Group your collection items in the Table View
- Perform a text search for items in Chandler and save the results as a custom collection.
- Context-sensitive menus
- Change the number of visible hours in the display & turn on and off timezone support
- Show or hide the timezone fields and select from a wider range of timezones
Some other new features that you can experiment with are:
- Create an event and stamp it as an email to notify others
- Receive event invitations in Chandler
- Drag and drop events between the all-day area and the main calendar
- Drag ics files onto the Chandler calendar
- Import files into an existing calendar
For more information, you can see our Alpha 2 Detailed Work Plan document on the OSAF wiki.
Publish a Free/Busy version of your calendar |
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You can publish your "My Calendar" collection in a "Free/Busy" form so others can see when you are available for meetings, without them being able to see the details of your scheduled events.
After the Free/Busy version of your "My Calendar" events have been published to the sharing server, the server returns a URL "ticket" that you can give out to other Chandler users so they cab subscribe to your Free Busy calendar. |
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When you create new events, change start or end times, move events to a different day, or delete an event, the subscribers of your Free/Busy calendar will see the changes the next time they sync with the server. |
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Here is an example of an imported Free/Busy calendar from another Chandler user that is overlayed along with with My Calendar. If you select one of the Free/Busy events, for example, the Thursday 9:30am event, you can see the start and end times in the detail view, but not any of the other details like Title, Location, or Notes. |
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Sort text based columns using the new column header and group table into sections |
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The table view can be sorted by clicking on the column header. Clicking the same header again reverses the sort order. |
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The resulting view can also be grouped by the attributes in the selected column. Select the View menu and select Use Sections to turn on the grouping function. |
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Access very rudimentary search |
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You can form a collection of Chandler items that have a search term contained in the fields visible in the detail view including the note field. |
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| Enter the search, a new collection will be created with all the items that contain the term. The search box will accept Lucene boolian queries. See the Lucene website for search syntax. |  |
The current implementation of search creates a static "snapshot" collection. In 0.7alpha2, if you add a new item, or modify an item and either add or remove the target term in that item, the search collection you created is not updated There are bugs in this release that may make the list of items in the search result collection look like it includes items that do not contain the search term. One is a screen refresh problem, if you resize your Chandler window slightly the list display will update and you will see the proper results.
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Changing View Preferences - Displayed Hours |
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The View > Visible Hours preference can be changed from the default Automatic setting to select the number of hours that are visible in the window. The Automatic setting fixes the size of the hour divisions so in order to see more hours at once you have to resize the Chandler window. This options is designed so that two lines of text are visible even in a one-hour event. |
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| By selecting View > Visible Hours > 12 hours you see 12 hours displayed in the Chandler window regardless of the height of the window. This allows you to see more of your day at once, but one-hour event lozenges may be so small that they cannot display the text information. By making the Chandler window larger you make more room to display text in the event lozenges. |  |
Changing View Preferences - Timezone Display |
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Context Sensitive Menus |
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Pop-up menus are generated based on what is selected. The standard right-click on Linux and XP, or ctrl-click in OSX displays the menu. |
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| In 0.7alpha2 there are only a few places that work, like in an editable field, or in the Calendar View, but the underlying tools are now in place to add more menus and keyboard shortcuts. |  |
Changing View Preferences - Timezone Display |
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