Austin Govella's dashboard

Reqall.com might be the perfect Sandy replacement. Uses natural language to detect and store notes, to-dos, a shopping list, and photos. (Contacts must be added seperately.)

You can send things in via IM or phone. It uses keywords to set dates: ReQall understands dates and times like “today at 5:30,” “Tuesday,” “8:00 a.m. on Jan 31st,” “this Friday,” “next Friday” and more.

There's also a Firefox extension, and email as a way to add stuff is also on the way.

Daily digest!!!

Also includes reminders, a news feed, and ical feed

I'm replacing a couple specific features.

First, the ability to forward an email (or call Jott, send a tweet, or SMS) and have it schedule something in the future. For that, I'm enjoying Deadline. Easy syntax, and it has an ical feed. It doesn't keep the original email for context.

For the to-do list I decided to move out of the cloud (so this never happens again) and am test-driving Things (for OS X). A to-do list manager with tagging, scheduled to-dos, and projects. Doesn't work with email yet (though they're talking about integrating with Mail), but I can drag n drop an email to crate a to-do, and that links back to the email. (That means I have to keep the email, instead of delete it.) Or, I can select text in the message and copy it to the task.

I also played with Basecamp. You can email to-dos to any Backpack page, so it's easy to create a page for different projects, or a page of to-dos and a page of laters. I don't like their reminders. You can also email notes, emails, and files to Basecamp. That's very Sandy-esque. They have a calendar, but I think gCal is a better option. Or the new Yahoo calendar (when it comes out of beta.) Cheap. However, I've been using this for years just as a notepad/place to jot and I gladly pay every month. No daily digest.

Highrise, by the makers of Basecamp let's you forward email, too. As a bonus, every email is associated with a contact. If it doesn't have the contact in the system, it makes a new contact. You can also forward emails to create tasks (and the task will link to the email which is attached to the contact). You can email tasks without attaching them to a contact, and it offers a daily digest and print version which is actually nicer than Sandy's. Emailed tasks can be scheduled but only for general times: today, tomorrow, this week, next week, or later. On the website, though, you can schedule tasks for specific days and times. Scheduled items have an ical feed. Contacts can be tagged. Notes would be added to a contact, or to a Case. But to have any number of useful Cases, Highrise is too expensive. (Everything but the cases is available fro free.)

Evernote is pretty good. You can email anything in (a photo, a file, an email) and it stores it for you. You can also tag items. It won't make contacts, but it's search is awesome. (It will even search text in images.) So, you can forward an email from a contact, tag it as "to-do" and "contact". And it's easy to search within a tag. So you could search all items tagged "contact" for "plumber" or "Joe" and Evernote would return the item to you. No dated items, but it'll store everything else. Free plan very robust. Paid plans are reasonable.

GoPingMe, ActionMethod, Remember The Milk, Gubb, and Todoist... didn't like them. Not elegant. Not simple. Not me. (IMHO)

Works here, too. Thank you, thank you. I didn't realize how much I depended on Sandy until the calendar stopped working.

For future trouble-shooting, was something changed on the backend? We tried turning the private feeds on and off (and resetting the address) previously.

Just curious.

On a lark, I tried the authenticated feed again, but got another error in iCal.

I used the username and password I use to sign in to the website and this address: webcal://iwantsandy.com/list.ics

More extensive troubleshooting is available on the Outlook thread.

I haven't heard back from help, either. :-(

Kind of sucks. They used to be really good about answering questions here and via email.

Kevin,

I followed the instructions exactly, and still nothing. Same errors as before.

Heh...

Considering the radio silence and calendar problems a couple of us are having, I think I'm kind of angsty.

My calendar program (Sandy) stopped working. :-(

Otherwise, fantastic. New job. Conference. Vacation. And Sandy to-dos and notes still work. :-)

Kevin,

You're correct, the original feed was authenticated and stopped working. After switching to the private feed, it still doesn't work.

In Safari, the download error says: "0 bytes of ? -- file doesn't exist".

Firefox downloads a file that contains one space character and nothing else. " "

The private feed link is: webcal://iwantsandy.com/[secret code]/list.ics
The download link is: http://iwantsandy.com/[secret code]/list.ics

To clarify, the error I get in iCal is this:

Request to the server http://iwantsandy.com/jjl2xMbTx5VVs0H... failed.

I have more detail posted on the other thread:
* http://getsatisfaction.com/iwantsandy...

(The important takeaway is that the calendar is broken no matter what calendar I use: iCal, Outlook, Google.)

I've had this same problem for several days (maybe a couple of weeks) and assumed you guys were tweaking/fixing something.

I'm using the private feed with iCal on a Mac. Originally it synched just fine, but lately iCal has been giving an error message: "Request to the server http://my%40domain.com@iwantsandy.com/list.ics failed."

I reset the private feed, but received the same error.

I tried to download the file to test the link but also get an error: "The calendar file is unreadable. No events have been added..."

I also added the feed to Google Calendar. As above, it worked for a while. Has not worked for a while. Google doesn't give me any error message. I know it's not working because updated to-dos and appointments do not change and new ones do not appear.

I don't understand why "I want Sandy" conjures up porn.

Seriously...

To have Sandy ignore words she normally interprets as instructions, put them in quotes.

Sandy *saves* the entire email (minus attachments) you send her. She *acts* on whatever you type after the "r", "remember", or "remind" keyword.

So, if you start your email with "r Buy Moby Dick from Amazon @todo", then she'll add that as a to-do item.

She saves the entire email as "more context".

On the website, when you select an item, you can click "more context" in the popup to see the entirety of the original email. Or you can select the item's link in the daily digest or lookup.

If you include the URL or any other text in the email after, "r Buy Moby Dick from Amazon @todo", you can still see it.

Easiest way is to forward to Sandy and add "r Meeting name on day at time" as the subject line or as one of the first lines in the email.

She'll add it to your Sandy calendar.

(You can actually add the "r " anywhere in the message and Sandy will see it.)

You can request Sandy lookup all of today's appointments and to-dos:
* http://iwantsandy.com/help/lookup

Not exactly a copy of the digest, but fulfills the same purpose (and maybe even more effectively).