Chandler, an open-source personal information manager (PIM), has reached its first public release milestone, version 0.6, and is now available for download.

Chandler is the brainchild of Andy Hertzfeld, the first programmer hired by Steve Jobs to work in the Macintosh System Group. Hertzfeld was responsible for writing much of the user interface and system code for what would become Mac System 1.0 in 1984, and although he left Apple shortly afterwards, he went on to write the code for the Switcher, the Mac's first task-switching utility, on contract.

After his Apple experience, he co-founded three companies: Radius, which made monitors and peripherals for the Mac market; General Magic, which made handheld digital assistants; and Eazel, which wrote open-source software and developed the Nautilus file manager that is still used in the GNOME desktop environment today.

Eazel made a big splash in the heady days of the dotcom boom, but it failed to secure its second round of investment funding and the company went bankrupt in May 2001. Not willing to give up on the idea of open-source application development, Andy joined the Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF) as a volunteer and one of its earliest contributors. The OSAF was founded by Mitch Kapor, the creator of Lotus, in the summer of 2001. It received financial contributions from Kapor himself (US$5 million), the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (US$1.5 million) and the Common Solutions Group (US$1.25 million) All this money has allowed the Chandler project, the prototype of which was written by Hertzfeld, to grow into a large project with as many as 23 full-time programmers working on it.

Chandler, which used to be called Vista when it was still a prototype but has grown much larger in scope, aims to do for PIMs and calendaring applications what Firefox did for web browsers. Available for Windows (tested only with XP), OSX and Linux, the application binary is a 60 MB download (the Linux binary comes bundled as an RPM and is only 23 MB). The user interface bears more than a slight resemblance to Apple's own iCal product, with each task on the calendar highlighted with a rounded, colorful overlay. As to be expected, there are significant gaps in functionality in the 0.6 product, and a few rough edges with the user interface. It was easy to create new events in the calendar by dragging and dropping, but it was not immediately obvious how to create new categories of event that are represented by different colors, which is a simple process in iCal.

However, the external resemblance to iCal belies the internal flexibility of the program. It is designed as a collaboration tool, where users in a workgroup can share their calendars and appointments on a central server. The development goal is to have a product that can duplicate much of the calendaring functionality of Microsoft Exchange in small workgroups, academic collaboration and even corporate environments. Already, it seems slightly more featured than Sunbird, the standalone open-source calendaring application that is part of the Mozilla suite. However, there are still many missing pieces to the puzzle. There is a mail function included in Chandler, but so far it is extremely rudimentary and only works for people in the Chandler workgroup, although the design goals are to be a fully-fledged IMAP and SMTP email client. Will this program develop into a legitimate Exchange competitor? At present it seems unlikely, but so was the formation of Lotus 1-2-3 and the Macintosh when those projects first started.