So I end up with almost all my PTO time at the end of the year and this past year was no exception: my boss basically told me that I had to take time off so I ended up spending the last 3 weeks on holiday.

My first day back tho was rather eventful for a Monday – the OSAF staff went thru a major restructuring and I found myself looking for a job. For some reason it didn’t seem to be bad news to me, sure I was on the phone talking to other team members about it and wondering WTF and the usual, but I decided to take it as a chance to change things up.

I have been helping the dev team of Seesmic work out some Jabber and Atom/RSS Feed issues and was getting the feeling that I could change my part time help to full time so after dealing with the news on Monday I took Johann up on his offer and joined the Seesmic team!

I’m going to still be active with Chandler and the OSAF staff as I feel passionately about the calenderaing and open-source world as I do now for my new job.

Here’s to a very eventful 2008 !!!

Rui Carmo posted a small bit about Chandler:

I used to think this would be able to stand up to the Outlook hegemony, but I find the current GUI hopelessly confusing. And what’s with the need for a separate Intel package?

While I can’t answer about the GUI thought I can about why we publish a separate package for Intel-based OS X Macs.

Basically the decision was made back when our choices when Panther and Tiger were both PPC and Intel was *very* new, was to go with two package that were smaller in size. Another concern was that the techniques for creating a universal binary was still new and un-proven in the Python and wxPython realm.

Thankfully that is not an issue now and one of the things I’m working on is a change to do exactly that. I still feel that we will probably have a huge download size but I guess we will find out.

update: of course after hitting send I realized I can speak also about the GUI issue: The Chandler GUI reflects/exposes a very powerful set of tools to help manage and deal with incoming items (mail, tasks, etc) and also the daily routine of deciding just what needs to be done when and how. So it *is* very busy and that can, I think, come off as confusing. What’s missing in our Preview is a road-map for completely new users.

I feel so happy to have helped with the Preview release and proud that the team has done such a great job to wrangle all of the various distractions, features and issues into meeting this major Milestone.

And all in a completely open manner – trust me, you can track each painful slip and mis-step we made if you wanted to :)

For me this totally validates the vision that Mitch and the management team set out for us from the start: integrate Design and Development into an open process but yet still deliver quality work.

Now it’s up to the people who will use Chandler in their real lives to give us feedback as to how well we did to hit that target.

After many rounds of changes here is the new Chandler logo:

yep, after all the searching and branding and name searching everyone has decided to continue using Chandler as a name :)

Now it goes to the lawyers to see if Chandler can become our official brand