Sandy vs Stikkit (aka - a Sandy wishlist)

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.