Chandler

I just read a transcript from a talk by Mitch Kapor and Andy Hertzfeld about the progress and vision of Chandler, an open source, cross-platform personal information manager. It looks like they have a lot of good ideas going into its development. Here are some highlights:

“We also want to be able to subscribe to someone’s information so that you can get updates automatically if something changes.”

“One of the things we liked best is that is uses native widgets whenever possible, so that users will have a consistent UI experience. If you’re running OS X, for example, Chandler will look like an OS X application.”

“The first thing to note is the navigation framework. We’ve taken a page from what we’ve learned from Web browsers, such that every functional area has its own URL, and in fact so does every data item, and in fact every attribute of every data item. To go to a certain View, you can just enter in the URI for that View.”

“We use Jabber as our instant messaging framework in part because it is extremely well designed but also because it’s completely open.”

“The exiting thing is that we can use Jabber not just for instant messaging but also as a framework for all of our sharing stuff.”

“Q: Is there a Web service available for a back end?

A: Andy: It’s very likely that we’ll have SOAP APIs to the repository. Right now we use RAP, which is based on BEEP, but it should be reasonably simple to add in a SOAP API.”