First of all, thank you very much for spending the time to download
Chandler and give us such detailed feedback. This really helps us to
make the product better!
Many of these issues/comments we are aware of already. You have found
a couple of new bugs though and I will make sure those are logged. We
did make some improvements in performance for 0.6 but realize this is
ongoing and we plan on tackling a number of different performance
goals for 0.7 as well. This issue regarding creation of items in the
Trash folder is known and will be addressed in the next release. We
didn't spend too much time on printing in 0.6 but this along with
improvements/enhancements for recurrence are some of the features
under discussion for 0.7.
For 0.6 our focus was really on usable calendaring so many other
areas of the application are still very preliminary (we know there
are bugs and inconsistencies), particularly around tasks and email.
For 0.7 we plan on improving the table view and tackling some of the
task management workflows you addressed below. This means building a
framework for task creation and triage. We are currently in the
process of design discussions for many of the features planned for
0.7. If you are interested, I would encourage you to subscribe to the
design list and participate in these discussions.
Thanks again!
Sheila
On Jan 18, 2006, at 1:29 AM, Jules wrote:
Hi, just thought you guys would appreciate some feedback on the 0.6
release. I last looked at chandler some time between the 0.1 and
0.2 releases, so this is an almost-fresh perspective on it for
you. Apologies if any of the below are known problems; in that
case just take them as suggestions that the problem is important.
OS is Windows XP SP2; a Linux-based server is available for
information sharing (I believe this is achieved through WebDAV,
which I have no experience of, but am confident I can set up).
User is an experienced developer looking for a suitable task list &
calendar application for a small workgroup (3 individuals working
for a small IT services company).
First thing I notice is that startup is very slow. On my PII-400,
it took about 20 seconds for the splash screen to appear, and well
over a minute for the application to load. Memory usage is also
very high: about 75MB without anything added to the calendar. For
an app that I would want to leave running constantly, this is just
too much. Combine with 40MB for a web browser & another 30 for e-
mail and my 256MB of system RAM is starting to run out already. If
e-mail could be added to Chandler without a noticeable increase in
the memory footprint it wouldn't be hideously bad, but it's still a
little high.
When I delete the "Welcome to Chandler" appointment, the
information on it in the side bar isn't removed.
Creating a new item for the task list is not very intuitive. The
tick mark in the button to add it to the list seems to imply that
the item has already been performed. If I press this button, then
press it again (because a tick mark appeared next to the item and I
thought I'd done something wrong) and then try to do something
else, it seems that the item is lost and I have to re-enter it. A
"this item is not stored anywhere, do you really want to abandon
it?" dialog would be useful. [added later: somehow I've found the
item again. It isn't entirely clear to me where it has been in the
meantime, but it does seem to have worked somewhat.]
Somehow I seem to have created new items in the "Trash" folder,
which I then have to move to "My tasks". Not sure what's going on
there, but it doesn't seem sensible, whatever it is. Perhaps a
confirmation dialog if the user tries to create something in the
trash folder would be sensible?
I have two "Untitled" items in my Trash folder because of this, but
can't seem to delete them from it. I assume this is because delete
works by moving stuff into Trash. It should change behaviour when
the item is already in Trash so that the item is totally purged.
It would also be useful to have "Empty Trash" as a context menu
item if you right-click on Trash.
Printing of task lists isn't implemented. This effectively rules
out using the current version for my purposes, but I suppose it's
now a priority task for future, unless I can achieve what's
necessary using the calendar. I'll switch to that approach.
Adding a recurring event is confusing. I double click at the top
of today, and get a new event dialog in the sidebar which is good.
I then choose 'daily' from the recurrence drop down list (I'd have
liked an option for 'on alternate days' or similar, but understand
that that's an unusual requirement; 'weekdays' would also have been
useful). I click on the content box to edit that, then realise
that I need to change the title, so I click on that. At this
point, I get a dialog asking me if I want to change all future
occurrences of the event. As far as I'm concerned, I'm still
working on the first addition of it, so of course I do. I'm then
asked again when I go back to editing the content. I think the
question should only ever be asked if the item has been 'closed'
since it was created, and even then it should only be asked once
per editing session.
The way calendars are printed is next to useless. The first
problem is that 'all day' events are not included. Also, the
event details aren't included, only the little marker that shows up
on the calendar with the item's title. I'd also like to be able to
print out just a single day's appointments, in a kind of expanded
form of the summary that appears in the view in the bottom left of
the Chandler window, but including all the details of the item
rather than just its time & title.
At this point I realise that Chandler is not yet ready for my
application and uninstall it. I hope this feedback can help
improve the next version, though, and look forward to trying it!
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