I downloaded and installed Chandler yesterday, and
copied over my (few) appointments to try it out. I only use evolution
for its calendar, and I’ve left it running as well so that I can more
easily compare the two side-by-side.

Chandler installed easily — the FC2 RPM installed without hitch
on my FC4 box. There’s no
.desktop file for it, so I ended up making one of my own… in
general its Gnome desktop integration is weak at the moment. The
install is big, but then they do package their own copy of Python in
there — a typical (and sane) ISV approach, but still a little
unfortunate.

Chandler is definitely prettier than evolution. It shows my
events in color with a nice (but by now almost standard) gradient
effect. The icon for Chandler is also beautiful, though again in a
somewhat standard way. You can see this stuff on the main Chandler
page.

Chandler does fix one evolution bug
that has bothered me. So far they are doing well on the little
details like these, especially when you consider that this is a pre-1.0
release. Also, they have been very responsive on my bug reports —
big plus to them!

It seems more memory-hungry than Evolution, that’s a minus.

I didn’t try any of the sharing stuff. Unfortunately for Chandler
my calendaring needs are quite modest at the moment.

I frequently wonder about the rationale behind writing Chandler.
It is nicer than Evolution in some ways, but surely not enough to
justify writing an entirely new application. Is it really about the
cross-platform-ness of it? As in, success looks like Mozilla, having
users across the platform spectrum? I haven’t found a really straight
answer to this, and I missed a chance to ask it directly at
OSCON.

Cosmo

The OSAF is also working on Cosmo,
a calendar server. This is an area I’ve never really looked into; I
seem to remember hearing a lot of complaints about the lack of this in
the past, but now there seem to be a few of these around. Maybe
someone out there knows what they are and how to compare them?