Chandler — another way to organise your notes.

I am a regular subscriber of Linux Magazine RSS feed and something like a month ago I came across this post by Dmitri Popov. He talks about application called “Chandler” that helps you organise your data in a convenient and straight forward way. After reading what Dmitri had to say about Chandler, I was tempted to try it myself.  Especially, considering the fact that I was looking for a good notes management application for quite a while. Following are my thoughts about this nifty program as well as some pitfalls occurred to me while using it.

First, let me introduce you to Chandler (if you are already familiar with it just skip down). Chandler is a “Note-to-Self Organiser” as they call it. It is an open source project with a very interesting vision. You can run Chandler on Windows, Mac OS or Linux (I tried it on Linux only). Main difference that a new person would notice is status for notes. Unlike many other applications that use either “Done/Not done” or “Complete/Incomplete” or even percentage Chandler has three statuses for any note – Now, Later and Done. Might be quite an unusual concept, but it works very well for me. Well, what is a “note” in Chandler anyway? The answer is – anything. Any piece of textual information can be a note. Even better than this, you can assign alarm to any note thus transforming it into reminder or specify start and end time to make an event out of it. Of course you can organise your notes into categories (collections in Chandler) and assign different colour to each category which will then display nice and colourful calendar. In short, it looks simple, it is simple and it is very powerful. Following are a few screenshots:

And what happens if you want to share your notes or have online access to them? Don’t worry, there is Chandler Hub. The hub is a very simple (I would even say minimalistic) web interface similar to the desktop application. All you have to do is to open new account with Chandler Hub, set it up in Chandler Desktop and voila! Now you can publish any category you want and Chandler Desktop will synchronise automatically with all the changes you make online. Nice and easy.

There are two more little applications mentioned on Chandler project`s webiste: QuickEntry widget for iGoogle and iPhone/iPod Thouch program. QuickEntry widget cannot be any simplier – just enter a note, chose a category and press Send, that is pretty much all you can do. As of iPhone application, I was able to find it in iTunes store, but when I tried to download it I’ve got an error saying that application is no longer available. Bad luck on this one.

Now, let’s talk about a few things I don’t like about Chandler. First of all – the loading time. It takes more than a minute for Chandler to start up on my 4 years old laptop. Yes, you may say – “Buy a new computer!”, but as a comparison, when I open OpenOffice document, Thunderbird with more than 2GB of emails and Firefox with a few tabs saved (all at once) it takes much less time to load. So, there should be something about Chandler. Another thing is memory consumption. Some people reported that Chandler uses hundreds of megabytes (literally), but for me it is usually something around 80-100 MB, which is still a lot. And I have only a few tens of notes at the moment. What will happen for hundreds or thousands? Will be, will see.

I can’t say anything really bad about the Hub. Its simple interface does the job quite well (it looks really ugly under IE6, although, I don’t understand why so many people still use this more than 8 years old browser). A few enhancements would be nice though:

1. There is no “remember me” option when you login, it can be quite annoying to enter your credentials over and over again.
2. There is no dashboard view and this is my major problem with Hub. Imagine that you have 10 or more collections and you want to see all the notes in “Now” status. The only way to do it at the moment is to go through all of the collections one by one. Frustrating, isn’t it?
3. Another nasty bug (or feature) is a quick entry bar – whenever it loses focus it clears it self. If, for example, you type something to enter a new note and then switch to another program (window) to copy/paste text from there when you come back to the hub screen everything you typed is gone. Why? No, really, why?

Finally, despite all of the problems mentioned above I do like Chandler and I will continue using it. As with many open source projects things are usually getting better with time and I know that there are plans for Chandler2. I’m looking forward with hope.

Links:

1. Chandler website – http://chandlerproject.org/
2. Chandler hub – http://hub.chandlerproject.org/
3. Linux Magazine – http://www.linux-magazine.com/