Recently active discussions in I want Sandy tagged with sms

This is a collection of tips, tricks and ideas on how lists can be used in iwantsandy.

Howdy!

I wanted to provide a quick status update on Sandy's Twittering abilities following yesterday's Twitter congestion [http://getsatisfaction.com/iwantsandy...] due in no small part to WWDC [http://developer.apple.com/wwdc/] and the sheer number of people following the "Stevenote" [http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net...].

The Twitter status blog reports that the "API request limit has been restored to 20 per hour." Sandy talks to Twitter as much as she's allowed — which means she'll be picking up your tweets every 3 minutes or so given the current rate limit.

If you happen to notice any Twitter updates before we do, please do share the latest here with your fellow Sandy clients!

Best,

Rael

Another one of two most-requested features that we think you'll really find useful!

Let Sandy know how you'd like her to remind you about something: via email, SMS/text, or Twitter, or not at all.

While you can turn email [http://iwantsandy.com/settings/email], mobile (text/SMS) [http://iwantsandy.com/settings/mobile], and Twitter [http://iwantsandy.com/settings/twitter] reminders on and off using your settings, you can also specify how you'd like Sandy to remind you on an item by item basis using these special reminder tags.

===== @email =====

Tag as item with @email and Sandy will email a reminder -- even if you've turned off email reminders. For example:

> remind me to pick up a pizza on the way home from work this evening @email

===== @sms =====

Tag as item with @sms and Sandy will send a text message to your mobile phone -- even if you've turned off mobile reminders. For example:

> remind me to call Susan during my commute at 7:30am @sms

You need to have already set up mobile reminders or Sandy won't know where to text you.

===== @twitter =====

Tag as item with @twitter and Sandy will send you a reminder tweet -- even if you've turned off Twitter reminders. For example:

> remind me to head downtown by 9:30am for my coffee date with Brad @twitter

You need to have already introduced Sandy to your Twitter self or she won't be able to send you a tweet.

===== @noreminder =====

Tag an item with @noreminder to make sure that Sandy knows not to remind you -- even if the item has a date or time. For example:

> Remember to mow the lawn on Sunday @noreminder

You can mix and match any of these reminder tags to have Sandy remind you in more than one way, for example:

> remind me to leave work at 5pm @email @twitter
> remind me about the Marketing meeting tomorrow 9-10am @sms @email

Note that reminder tags override all of your reminder settings; Sandy will *only* remind you by SMS/text if you tag something with @sms -- even if you have email and/or Twitter reminders turned on by default.

You'll find updated documentation in the Cheat sheet [http://iwantsandy.com/help/cheatsheet] and Guide book [http://iwantsandy.com/help/guide].

Happy New Year!

—Rael

Howdy!

Our good friend Greg Borenstein over Ideas for Dozens has written up some wonderfully helpful articles on:

Working with Sandy via Twitter/SMS

A port of the fabulously useful "QuickSilver Append Trick" (for the incomparable QuickSilver on Mac OS X

And, my personal favorite of his write-ups — keeping things front-and-center using Safari's new Web Snippets feature

Greg writes:

I've made two Sandy-related widgets: one for my appointments for the month and one for my items tagged @computer. I use the @computer tag in a GTD-ish manner to specify TODO items that I can accomplish at my computer.

One of the big lessons I've learned from my attempts at doing GTD has been the importance of putting your inboxes and other TODOs directly in your path, someplace you'll stumble over them in the course of your normal daily operations. And these little applications are a really lightweight way to do just that, eliminating nearly all the friction involved in maintaining and making reference to my lists and reducing the opportunity for fiddling to a minimum.

If GTD is your cup of Rooibos, I highly recommend you take his instructions for a spin.

Thanks, Greg!

—R

First, I should apologize for the length of this post. I'm wordy.. sorry. The purpose of this post is to compare and contrast Sandy with the previous generation Values of N product 'Stikkit'. I hope to spark some good discussion and perhaps guide future Sandy development now that we know that Stikkit is being left 'as is'. I was (am) an avid Stikkit user and I believe Stikkit offers some capabilities that Sandy is missing (and vice versa). This post is NOT intended to be a flame of anyone nor should it be viewed as wholly negative. My intention here is "constructive criticism" and I hope that it will be taken as such. Stikkit and Sandy are both revolutionary products that deserve heaps of praise. The fact that we are allowed to use these advanced tools free of charge really is amazing and it is not lost on me.

I'm going to speak more here about 'capabilities' than 'features'. Ultimately, I don't really care exactly how the software implements something (ie - feature), I just care what the software allows me to do (ie - capability). So, I will talk about the capabilities that the two platforms have and leave it to the reader and to the Values of N guys to discern how something should actually be implemented. Occasionally these lines will blur, but I will tend to lean towards capabilities where possible.

Ubiquitous Capture:
This capability is the core functionality of either of these tools. The idea is that you should be able to capture as much data as possible from as many sources as possible. This is a key capability and is, in my opinion, why Stikkit is a better product. There are two facets to this capability: flexability of capture and ease of access. I'll address each seperately.
Flexability of Capture -- Stikkit could capture ANYTHING. Shopping Lists, Car Repair Schedules, your favorite poem, recipes, notes, ... the list goes on and on (and could be captured in a Stikkit!). Literally ANYTHING that was text could be dumped into Stikkit and the text would be archived for searching. It was amazing. All you had to do to find a stikkit was think of one semi-unique word that was somewhere in the text and it could be found. You could add tags for extra layers of organization. Fantastic, fantastic. Sandy, on the other hand, really struggles here. You have to use certain key words. You have to have proper structure. She still has trouble with multi-line items. Its crippled. This absolutely MUST be addressed. My preferred solution would be that any message that is sent only to Sandy should be completely captured, just like Stikkit. I understand that when Sandy is CC'd on things, she doesn't need to be invoked on all the text. But if Sandy sees that she is the sole recipient of a message, she needs to remember every last bit of text. If I had a real secretary that deleted my emails to her just because she didn't understand why I sent them to her, I'd fire her! Let me do the thinking, let Sandy do the remembering (more on the 'remember' keyword later).
Ease of Access -- Stikkit blows away Sandy in flexability, but the race is much closer in ease of access. I think stikkit still nudges Sandy out though. With Stikkit, you had a unique email address that you could send in text from. That worked well. It also meant that you could add stikkits via SMS (a fantastic ability that I will address more later). Stikkit also had a *FANTASTIC* API that allowed countless command line and widget interfaces to be developed. That made access really easy and meant I was much more likely to actually USE it. Sandy's basic interface is nowhere near as effortless. Launching a new email, navigating email fields, populating fields, and formatting proper text to Sandy are all sort of a nuisance, especially compared to Stikkit's command-line level streamlined access. But, Sandy gains back some ground with Jott. That is absolutely amazingly super-fantastic cool. I've killed myself trying to get Stikkit and Jott to play together and haven't pulled it off yet. Jott gains a lot of ground for Sandy, although the implementation needs some more work (tags, lists, etc).

Here's the real deal with this whole 'ubiquitous capture' issue. If all I wanted was something where I pull up some webpage (or email) and populate some fields and get an entry, I could use any number of desktop clients and get great results. If I wanted access from the web, there are again, countless numbers of web-based apps that offer similar capabilities. The real differentiator here is the mobile capability and the streamlined access that the 'natural language' parser allows. The ability to interact in natural language via SMS while on the move is HUGE. It cannot be overstated how important it is. It is the one single feature that Stikkit (and sort of Sandy) have to offer that other services cannot. As such, Values of N need to absolutely perfect it. Hammer on this until there are so many ways to add things to Sandy that our heads spin. Until you have the capability, you won't stand out from the 30Boxes, Googles, Outlooks, RememberTheMilks, and Stikkits of the world. Some suggestions on how to do this (these are features that I swore I wouldn't talk about.. oops):
- a dedicated SMS address that doesn't eat up our secondary email address slot.
- SMS friendly syntax. Compare the "-" in Stikkit to make a todo vs the "@todo" in Sandy. One character vs five characters. Stikkit wins. Make Sandy's syntax more thumb friendly.
- the aforementioned "remember all text when the email is just sent to sandy" (MUST HAVE)
- release an API to allow the userbase to start churning out widgets
- bookmarklet

Syntax and Options:
There are two keywords in Sandy, "remember" and "remind me" that even the documentation says are basically identical. Then why, for the love of pete, do we have both of them?!? One is redundant and just complicates things! My suggestion though is to change the functionality of remember such that it does not create a reminder for any date or time dependent items. So "remember dinner tomorrow at 5pm" creates a calendar entry w/o a reminder, "remind me of dinner tomorrow at 5pm" creates a calendar entry WITH a reminder. The default reminder on for all calendar entries is a nuisance. I like to put a date and time on EVERYTHING. As a result, my phone is going off all the time with reminders from Sandy. Reminders that I really didn't want to being with. Either make the two different key words actually do something different or get rid of one. I vote for the former.

So... there's my novel. I'm sorry it was so long. I just feel that Sandy is on the cusp of being something great and with a little nudging, it could really take off. I know I'd love for it to become THE killer app, and I'm sure the Values of N folks would love that too. If I can offer any clarification on what I've talked about above, I'd be happy to do so. If I've said something completely stupid, I'm open to criticism as well. One way or the other, I'd just like some of these issue to be talked about in the hopes that Sandy can start addressing them. I feel that unless many of these issues are addressed, Sandy will not be able to flourish like it should. Thanks for reading.

Hello friends of Sandy,

As some of Sandy's more adventurous clients have already noticed*, Sandy's more than aflutter over Twitter [http://twitter.com]. She's ready to chat with you by direct private message from your mobile phone over text/SMS or your desktop via instant messenger (AIM, iChat, Gtalk, and LiveJournal).

Twitter with Sandy by direct private message just as you would any of your other Twitter friends and she'll twitter you back (almost always within a minute).

To get Twitter and Sandy talking, visit your Twitter settings at http://iwantsandy.com/settings/twitter and follow the 4 easy steps to introduce Sandy to your Twitter self.

Essentially, you'll become Twitter friends, mutually following one-another.

Then try:

> d s hi

(In Twitter-speak, this means: "Send Sandy a direct private message saying 'hi'." Note that Sandy's Twitter user name is "S" rather than "Sandy" or "iwantsandy", saving your thumbs some mobile typing.)

Sandy will reply to your tweet with instructions on asking her to remember or remind you about things, look things up, etc.

> Hi, I'm Sandy, your personal assistant.
> Set a reminder: r go for a walk in 15 mins
> Look something up: l today
> Invite a friend: invite pat@example.com
> About me: visit iwantsandy.com
> More examples: visit iwantsandy.com/examples
> Help: visit iwantsandy.com/help/twitter

Right now Sandy will respond to "remember" or "remind" ("r" in even shorter shorthand), "lookup" ("l" as in lower-case "L"), and "invite" ("i"). She'll soon be able to update and forget on Twitter just as she does in email.

****
Don't forget the "d s" bits when twittering to Sandy!** Twitter is a broadcast medium by default, so simply twittering "remember to wear pants" (while an entertaining tweet ;-) will go out to all of your Twitter followers rather than privately to Sandy.
****

You'll find more detail on Sandy's Twitter help page at http://iwantsandy.com/help/twitter

Enjoy!

Rael

* Rich over at Dinsdale! not only noticed that Sandy was paying attention to tweets before we even had a chance to announce this feature ;-), he even wrote up a lovely how-to. [http://dinsdalepiranha.wordpress.com/...]

Howdy!

Here's a little something we've been all aflutter about over here at Sandy Central...

If you're a twitterer, Sandy can now send you reminder tweets using the Twitter's direct private messaging feature [http://help.twitter.com/index.php?pg=...].

From there you can redirect those reminders to your mobile phone by SMS/text message (of course you can already have Sandy do that); your desktop via AIM, iChat, Gtalk, and LiveJournal; or just silence when you want a little quiet time.

This is one small step for Sandy, but the first toward accept tweets from your cellphone and IM client.

You'll find my Twitter page at: http://twitter.com/s

(I'm using "S" rather than "iwantsandy" to save your thumbs some mobile typing.)

Find out more about twittering with Sandy at: http://iwantsandy.com/help/twitter

Or just go ahead and introduce Sandy to your Twitter you at: http://iwantsandy.com/settings/twitter

Enjoy!

Rael