I gave a demo of Chandler at the Wall St. Journal's "D: All Things Digital" conference last Monday. It was billed as the first public demonstration of the program, which is a bit ironic for an open source project which can be downloaded off the website at any time. To be fair, though, several staff members and I spent a bunch of time preparing several data sets and working out the choreography of the demo. Even if you were to download the actual demo branch used, it would be a lot less impressive than watching me spin the product through its paces with good data. A lot of it is that I know both where the good features are and where the bad bugs are.

All caveats aside, the demo came off well. Enough of Chandler's calendar is working to give a good demo. I showed basic calendar functionality, leveraging the GUI to show double-clicking for new events, dragging events to change the time and date, switching between day and week view, using the mini-calendar to navigate etc. Before Alec Flett went on paternity leave, he got the color gradient fill working, and he and Mimi Yin worked on selecting a basic set of colors, so events looked pretty. Overlaying multiple calendars also works, and I showed that as well.

Performance on the PC version of Chandler is getting to be a lot better. The main demo calendar I used had several hundred events and was quite responsive. I also showed the Mac version, more briefly. Its performance still has a ways to go, but we are working on it.

I demonstrated interoperability with Apple iCal by publishing from iCal to our 0.1 Cosmo server, and then subscribing from Chandler.

The last two parts of the demo went off into some of Chandler's more innovative features, showing generalized sharing of mixed collections, not just events, between Chandler instances. I did a little mini-demo reminiscent of ON Technology's Instant Update, a collaborative word processor.

Finally, I showed two parcels (Chandlerese for plug-ins) which had been quickly developed using the developer platform. One fetched items from an Amazon wish list using the Amazon web services API and plunked them into the repository complete with graphics and intermixing them with the other events, tasks, and notes already there. The other did the same with FlickR photos identified by tag.

Net net, I think it came across that:

(1) we're serious about putting a usable calendar in people's hands as soon as possible

(2) Chandler starts looking like something easy to get into, but is also going to be innovative.

Remember, the goal is that the 0.6 release will be usable by early adopters this fall.

Thanks especially to Pieter Hartsook for putting together the data sets and basic demo script, to John Anderson and Morgen Sagen for fixing last-minute bugs, and Aparna Kadakia for QA.