Saturday, December 6, 2008

Keep those requests coming

Just a quick note to thank you all for the support and feature requests you guys have been providing both on the blog and on twitter.
I also want to let you all know that every single one of those requests has been added to our project wiki at this point.

Like Anna said on the previous post it's very important for us to have a clear picture of what your priorities are as users. So keep giving us feedback on your favorite features, and also don't be shy requesting new features because it will be a lot of fun for us to expand Sandy's skill set.

Cheers and thank you all. :)

43 comments:

Anonymous said...

I find the lists feature very useful. The ability to create, modify, recall, and search a list by email (which I assume is fairly simple to design in open source) is very helpful for people with high email but low internet connectivity (like some Blackberry users).

Unknown said...

Process e-mails with attachments. Sometimes I need to forward an e-mail with an attachment to multiple people and Sandy would always completely ignore those e-mails. If nothing else I'd like the new Sandy to ignore the attachment and still act on what I put after the "Sandy," command. That would be a great enhancement! Thanks, -Matt

Jill said...

Hey, have you guys considered combining your efforts with something like www.gopingme.com ?

I just learned about it, and it's a pretty good service, although it does not have any of the same natural language capabilities of Sandy. But I suspect it has a good basic skeleton.

Dark Star said...

Most used feature was the reminder service. I was using sandy in conjunction with Jott until Jott started charging for the Sandy extension, then I went to Dial2Do. I would LOVE to see Sandy enhanced with a true calendar sync (like Plaxo syncs with my iCal) and would love the ability to call Sandy directly (like reQall) ReQall has some great feature such as being able to enter info via instanst message, also, the webclip function (via Firefox extension) of reQall is great. But reQall doesn't allow you to set individual reminders for each event, which kind of screws it all up for me. I getting a SMS that it's mom's birthday 15 mins before her bithrday is great, but I need to know it's coming up on PAYDAY 15 days before so I can get a gift, and then AGAIN on her borthday so I can call her. If you are able to add a plaxo-like syncing calendar, then having the alerts built into the calendar-sync itself would be awesome. I would love to be able to use my iCal on my laptop, have it sync with Sandy, and Sandy be in charge of sending out any associated alerts (even if the alerts have to be set in Sandy and not in iCal), because if my Powerbook is off, no alerts go out.

Avery Payne said...

The one thing that I wish Sandy would have handled: IM via Jabber. It was cool to be able to "talk" with Sandy, it would be even cooler to interactively talk with Sandy via IM. In essence, everything you would do through email, just through a different medium.

Nuno said...

@avery I actually requested that feature, like reschedule stuff over IM in a conversational fashion. :)

Avery Payne said...

Samurai, truly that is more than I could hope for. IMHO, Sandy's real magic was in the way 'she' presented herself to people. When I sent emails out to folks and cc:'d Sandy for follow-up, people immediately assumed that Sandy was a live person! I would here comments like 'who's this Sandy, why have I never heard of her?". At one point someone asked if she was my secretary! The way in which we converse with Sandy, and the semi-contextual canned responses we received during that interaction gave it the human touch that I think most Jane and Joe User could relate to.

The real letdown I had with Sandy was the clunky @command interface for todo, etc. When compared to the almost natural prose used for scheduling, the @ commands almost seemed like a step backwards. Maybe there is a way to standardize on a set of phrases that Sandy can latch on to instead of reverting to those? Not to say that the @command interface should be dumped, there are situations where power users and programmers could make the most of it; rather, it should be a core interface that is overlayed by the NL processing, giving the best of both worlds.

Did someone mention personality modules? I can hardly wait to talk with Sandy's cousin 'Cindy', or even converse with 'Sam'. That's a great way to customize responses for users. Just my .02 cents.

Christian Long said...

Can you add me to the dev mailing list? I'm Python-powered, and ready to contribute.

I'm christianzlong on gmail

Thanks,

Christian Long

Daniel said...

I would like to have the ability to set reminders for other people who have given me authorisation to do so (wife, employee, boss, etc).

Anonymous said...

Reliability, I presume... I really need to have something I can rely upon. It has been great and very productive to have a to do list in the morning. That way I was getting through work a lot faster than without.

Anonymous said...

I used Sandy a lot, but my biggest problem with Sandy was the lack of ability to schedule something to repeat on "the 2nd Tuesday" or "last Wednesday" of the month.
I would have been happy even if you could only set this up on the web site. There's a large thread about this feature request in Sandy's getsatisfaction support forum.

Chris said...

I would like to see a weekly digest as an option to or in addition to the daily one. I set up my wife an account and since she is in a different line of work, she felt the daily digest was a little too much and therefore stopped checking it.

Chris said...

I would also like to see the abiltiy to set multiple reminders for the same event. For example, a reminder that Mom's birthday is a week away and one that it is today.

beaconhour said...

I'm sure that someone has already thought of this, but just in case.... The logo for the new site should be the original Sandy character, but viewed from behind; in other words, Sandy's back.

Avery Payne said...

BTW, have you considered interfacing with Oloh as part of this? Just curious.

Beth Skwarecki said...

new feature: The "girl secretary" trope always bugged me. Why not let her gender be configurable? I'd like to flip a switch in my preferences and get emails signed from, say, Andy.

Speaking of which - is this new project still going to be called Sandy? Legally, "iwantmandy" (candy/brandy/sue/whatever) might be less risky.

Beth Skwarecki said...

new feature: knowing when holidays are. (Somewhere in the settings, you would check off which ones you care about: "jewish holidays" / "US federal holidays" / "phases of the moon" / custom / etc)

Anonymous said...

Please bring back Sandy!

Favorite features (and I would gladly pay a monthly fee for these):

1) natural language parsing via email -- this is the reason I haven't found a suitable alternative to IWS yet.

2) return notification on emails & text messages

3) personal friendly interaction as if Sandy was a real person

4) todo list, timed reminders for appointments, and text message updating

Gene Littleton said...

I hate to be impatient (it's impossible for me), but what's going on? Have I been missing something here, or has the project stalled?

Andy Kaplan-Myrth said...

Uh oh -- has the Sandy's Back project stalled? There's spam in these comments and there hasn't been a post since early December...

Bookmom said...

Another thing: make her able to not only read things from my Gcal or RTM, but let her add things to those calenders as well! I like to have both displayed on my Gmail page, so when I'm reading messages I can quickly glance at both my calender and my task lists to figure out if what's being discussed is possible or not.

Gene Littleton said...

@ Andy: I believe this is DOA...

However, in case anyone is still working on this, we are all a bit skittish about this now, so it would be nice if we could download a backup of our info until things get completely stable.

Biggus Dickus said...

Hi,

Can I please be added to the development mailing list if possible? I do this stuff for a living and would be happy to contribute. iWantSandy back! I'd like to have a look at your data model, and get to the code tree to start learning what is under development. My personal email is

travis at travishancock dot com.

Thanks, and excited,

Travis

Anonymous said...

Any activity on this project?

It would be great to get Sandy back, so I sure hope a bunch of open source folks are still going to do this...

What news?

JSW said...

Hey smart people. Is this still a project you all are working on?

Logan Greer said...

Looks like this project is dead...

...shame...

David Nieporent said...

Oh, well. Guess this never went anywhere.

JSW said...

Is this project still active?

Nellie V. said...

Darn. Looks like this project is dead. I was so excited when I stumbled across it, too -- sounded like a great idea.

Московские легенды said...

Are you still alive?

namie said...

I think the project might still be active. their twitter page (http://twitter.com/mysandy) was last updated on April 20th and had news about working on a logo and such.

Happily, one of their tweets indicated that "Absolutely - there will be personalities, for sure :)"

But most interesting was this particular tweet: "We're a long way away from it, but our hope is to have several personalities that you can choose from."

So, if you're interested in the project and have a twitter account, I'd say follow them.

Anonymous said...

Cool story as for me. It would be great to read something more about this theme.
BTW look at the design I've made myself High class escort

Anonymous said...

Any one still out there?

Michael Littleton said...

If 3 months of waiting hasn't done it for you, the answer is "No. No one is out there."

Anonymous said...

So this effort has completely stagnated. If the existing code / requirements were pushed to GitHub and an announcement were made, I bet you'd have more help than you can imagine.

I know I would and most of my developer friends could get something usable pretty quickly - in just a few weeks.

Nick Jackson said...

I STILL MISS SANDY!

JakeyP said...

If anyone does still ever read this - I do to, and I am building a replacement the best I can now. If you want a say in any features that will go live, shoot me over an email at jp@jakelprice.com

Anonymous said...

Yes, i read this.
I think, best you can do is to realise at least some of the most important features of old Sandy.

Anonymous said...

mysandy developers need to put a comment on the blog saying the project is dead. Everything just stopped suddenly, I would really like to know if any of the code written works? Did anyone take it and use it?

@JakeyP well did you make anything yet

JakeyP said...

Its been on hiatus whilst I complete freelance projects, but I have it at a point where:

- You can use natural language to set reminders (remind me to pick up some milk on my way home at 6:30)

- reminders can be sent via SMS, email and google talk.

- You can tag things you want to remember (remember my username for ebilling is xyz @bills) and see what is in the list (list @bills)

- Daily and weekly digest emails about the day ahead

- All reminders are sent to a calendar system, so you can export the data

Still got to work this into an interface, but I would presume its not that far away from getting a beta out.

JakeyP said...

Okay - I have realised a BETA of the system - its available at http://passistly.com/

Please give us a try - we are free, and we might make you very happy!

Московские легенды said...

OK. What`s wrong:
1. On the page "http://passistly.com/login" page title is "Title"
2. Registration link did not working
3. After unsucessful signin i have a message (at the page top):
"SELECT * FROM users__user WHERE `username` = 'here is my email' AND `password` = 'eeef43e2808831e77b70c8ae590e897588e86fd5' AND active = 1 LIMIT 1"

Anonymous said...

"its not that far away from getting a beta out."

Anything you come up with now will be a disappointment after 5 years.
Just give up already.