OStatic

The story of the open source notebook and to-do manager application Chandler is a long and complicated one, as we covered here when it arrived in version 1.0. It was originally started as one of Mitch Kapor's projects, but Kapor (the founder of Lotus) left it, and it took on new life as a community-driven project for Windows, the Mac and Linux. Now available in version 1.0.2, it's a powerful mashup of to-do list tracking, tickler alarms, note tracking, calendaring and more. Collaborative workers can also use it together to brainstorm, share project, event and calendar items, and track milestones. Here's a look at how it works.

The Chandler Project has been around for a long time. How long? Long enough for a book to be written about it; long enough to be used as a bad example of how to run a project; long enough to be cited as evidence that dynamic languages can't scale. And yet...despite setbacks and revisions, the project never went away. Last week, version 1.0 of the note-to-self organizer software shipped.

Fellow OStatic blogger Mike Gunderloy wrote a great post at Web Worker Daily about his family's experience homeschooling and working from home. In it, he gives some terrific tips about finding a balance between having structure and staying flexible.

As a homeschooling mom who also works full-time from home, there are a number of open source tools I rely on every day to teach my kids and keep us all on task, while keeping myself productive and (relatively) stress-free.