Sandy Your Personal Email Assistant

Sandy Your Personal Email Assistant comes from values of n. This is the group led by former O'Reilly CTO Rael Dornfest. They previously launched stikkit which used a similar natural language interpreter to schedule events.

I never quite got the hang of stikkit and stopped using it. I found the more familiar interface metaphor used by Gubb to be a better fit for the way I work. Sandy may be more stick than stikkit for me though. It has some interesting features and I may use it for a while longer despite my concern of fragmenting my Calendaring behavior (my Smartphone is my master calendar).

Sandy works through an email interface. You send email to your account using the familiar secret sauce unique email address format. Using the key words remind me preceding a string creates an event. However, it didn't like the way I specific a time period like this: 1:45 - 2:45. This led to two separate events being created for the specified day. Fortunately, the web interface made it easy to delete one and correct the remaining event.

I also noticed an interface for Microsoft Outlook 2007. I was too lazy to boot up the Vista PC that has Office 2007 installed on it. So, I haven't tried it yet. What I really need, though, is a web calendaring service that syncs directly with my Windows Mobile smartphone without going through Outlook or Exchange Server.