Chandler 0.1
Chandler 0.1 has been released. It’s interesting to finally get a glimpse into what those guys at the OSAF have been up to. After spending a few minutes playing with Chandler, here are my notes:
- I was surprised to see that there’s no support for reading or composing e-mail, which struck me as funny for a product that’s going to become a viable replacement for Outlook. But apparently they’ve been focused on the framework, not the functionality.
- The focus of the current documentation is on creating “Viewer Parcels”, which are basically plug-ins that provide some functionality within the shell of the main application. This seems similar to the design of Nautilus, the Gnome file manager, which makes sense because Andy Hertzfeld, who now works for OSAF, was one of the original designers of Nautilus. The value of Nautilus views vs. external applications has been debated recently, so it will be interesting to see how this plays out with Chandler. Do people really want to have their e-mail, contacts, calendar, music library, time tracking, etc, all within the same application, or are many single-task applications better?
- They’re planning on using Python’s built-in POP3/SMTP/IMAP libraries for networking. Why not use Twisted, which is much more powerful, and quickly becoming the standard for Python-based network applications? Maybe they wanted to avoid another dependency.
- A question I’ve faced myself: What’s the best way to distribute and unstable Python application for testing? The OSAF solution: Bundle an entire Python distribution with your binaries. No extra packages to install, and you just delete the folder when you’re done testing. But it makes for a big download.
