We released Chandler 0.6 today.

After spending lots of effort trying to build up all the application areas at once, we decided to put all of our effort into building out one area, so that people would have something that they could use. The area we decided to build out was the calendar, since there's a real need for a good calendar solution. So this is our first step into calendar land. This version doesn't have every feature that you'd like to see, but it's a good start. The new project web site has some screenshots and some Flash movies that demonstrate some of the features. Features of note include: the ability for two people to share the same calendar (both people can create and update events) via a CalDAV server and support for managing events in different time zones. OSAF is providing an experiment CalDAV service for people who want to kick the tires. This service is using Cosmo, our Java based CalDAV server. Cosmo is licensed under the Apache License, and uses Apache Jackrabbit. There are still some sharp edges, but we are going to start using this version of Chandler as our day to day calendar at OSAF.

On the platform side of things, we've completely done away with our old XML based mechanism for describing Chandler parcels (extensions) and switched over to a system that uses Python to do the same thing. We've spent some decent effort on developer documentation, and we ought to be ready for brave souls to try to write some parcels. There are few sample parcels included in the distribution, including a simple (and I do mean simple) RSS feed reader, an interface to Amazon wishlists, and an interface to Flickr.

As always, bugs, patches, comments, and questions to the Chandler design or development mailing lists.

For those of you following what Julie is up to, she'll be at South By Southwest (SXSW) for a panel. At the moment she's up on the front page of the SXSW site.