The personal information manager Chandler rocks the house.

Unfortunately, it was a target of the Wired hype machine, labeled as the “Outlook killer”, half a decade ago. It was also the subject of a full-length book about software development failure. Its founder (and FUNDER) recently left the project. Apparently, pretty much everyone that has been following the project for any length of time (fortunately I’m not in that group!) has doomed it. So, with everything going against it, it was apparently time for the devs to step it up.

The 0.7.7 release is absolutely humming on my linux and Windoze boxxen. They all sync to a central web server (the “Hub”) that the Chandler project maintains. Then you also get a really nicely done functioning AJAX website to manage your tasks. It’s all open source, so maybe some day I’ll set up my own server (I’m naive like that, and stubborn too, so I might pull it off). In the meantime, I’m synced and happy.

The snag I hit in setting it up was getting Chandler to sync through a proxy. I chatted with the devs on the #chandler channel on FreeNode, they helped me through it. I filed a bug that explains the workaround they provided, added a new FAQ entry, and while I was at it, added a request for an official gentoo ebuild. Whoop.