NEW: iCal, gCal, we-all-Cal with iCal

Do you Gcal? Think inside the 30 Boxes? Outlook (Windows) or iCal (Mac) more your speed? Take your I want Sandy calendar (and to-dos too) with you to any calendar capable of subscribing to remote calendars using the iCalendar standard.



Here's how:

1. Turn on Sandy's private iCalendar feed for your account: visit your Account settings page, select "Yes", and click the "Save" button.

2. Click the "Subscribe" link (iCal or Outlook 2007), "Download" link (Outlook 2003), or copy your private iCalendar feed's address (ready for pasting into Google Calendar, 30 Boxes, and others).

3. Visit Sandy's Calendar feeds help page for details on subscribing Google Calendar, Outlook 2003 and 2007 (Windows), iCal (Mac), and more.

Sandy's always provided an iCalendar feed of your appointments, reminders, and to-dos. Only the feed was protected by a username and password — and, so, inaccessible to calendar applications and services that don't support such authentication (we're looking at you, Google Calendar ;-).

Many of you asked if we could provide a private iCalendar feed — protected by an obscure URL packed with random letters and characters. (OK, so you asked for at least the first part of that!) And that's just what we've done.

Find out more »

NEW! Sandy's email is now richer, prettier, and even more fun!

Sandy's a pretty colorful and playful character, always striving not only to help you be more productive, but to bake a little fun into the otherwise functional nature of getting and keeping organized.

To that end, she's taken the wraps off her brand new HTML email format. Sandy's replies and reminders are now richer, prettier, and even more fun! Most importantly, though, they're still just as helpful, functional, and powerful as they've always been -- and there's deeper functionality on the way!

• Anyone signing up as a new client will have HTML email automatically enabled for their account.


• If you're an existing client, you can turn on HTML email by visiting your Email settings page, selecting "Rich text (HTML)" under "Email format", and clicking the Save button.

(We wanted to be sure not to toss existing clients a curve-ball by having email showing up out of the blue.)

The HTML version of Sandy's email messages all still include a plain text version (identical to those you're already used to receiving) for compatibility with email programs that do better with plain text email.

We hope you enjoy the splash of color!

Mail 2.0: Making email a useful web app

Ever wonder what it takes to create an email-dwelling left-justified, text-only application? Find out at Web 2.0 Expo - San Francisco (April 22-25, 2008) where I'm honored to be speaking on that very subject...

Making Email a Useful Web App

Why does email continue to thrive despite “email overload” and the occasional need to declare “email bankruptcy.” Why hasn’t it gone away? What does it want from us? Where is it going (aside from my inbox)? What is its ongoing role in a Web 2.0 world?

Email is a thin wrapper of technology around the innately understandable medium of the written word. It provides context and conversation — both explicit and implicit — like nothing else. It is inherently social and collaborative — for lack of a better term, it might even be called a “social network.” And email is a flexible “carrier wave” for wondrous applications: photo albums, file-sharing, backup, invitations, notifications, threaded discussion, …

This session delves into the lessons we’ve learned from email, what it still has to teach us about simplicity, virality, frequency, distribution, and timeliness, and how much more it still has to contribute to the conversation.

We’ll survey the landscape of historical, current, and future killer email apps with an eye to building left-justified, text-only applications that allow email do more, no just suck less.

And we’ll tuck in to just what it takes to create email-dwelling services and applications, from the envelope on in to the words inside: the filtering, cleaning, parsing, and crafting that goes into creating a compelling, conversational interface to data, information, services, workflow — and even other people.

NEW! Invite your friends

Everyone deserves a personal assistant! That's why Sandy makes it simpler-than-pie to introduce her to friends and share appointments, to-dos, and other details just by Cc'ing her.

Some of you have been asking us to bake invitations right into Sandy's web site so that you can see exactly what Sandy will be mailing off to your friends as well as having the chance to include a note of your own.

And that's just what we've done. At the top of any page on Sandy's web site you'll find a brand new "Invite" link that leads to a brand new "Invite a friend" page.

• Invite one or many friends all in one go.


• A handy "Add from my address book" wizard gives you easy access to your friends' email addresses, wherever they're stored: AOL, Yahoo!, Outlook, Gmail, Plaxo, Palm, ...


• Because you know your friends better than Sandy does, you can choose an invitation template for Sandy to use.


• Enclose a personal note to your friend(s).


• Anyone you invite is added to your Friends list, where you can choose what you would like Sandy to do when when they share something with you.

Give the gift that keeps on reminding!

NEW! Goals: Focus on what's important

Your head has better things to do than to keep track of the myriad details of daily life. Sandy's mission is to remember those details for you, freeing you up to focus on what's important.

And what better way to keep your eye on the prize than to write it down and keep it front-and-center as you go about your day.

To that end, we've carved out a spot in your Daily Digest to add a goal, guiding principle, or inspirational quote that'll appear at the top of your Digest email each morning and alongside your appointments and to-dos on your "Today" page.

My personal inspiration for this week reads: "Anywhere is walking-distance if you have the time."

To add a goal to your Daily Digest, visit http://iwantsandy.com/home, click the "Customize" link, type or paste it into the "Goal, principle, or inspiration" field, and click the "Save" button. Your goal will appear immediately at the top-right of the page and any time you visit your "Today" page thereafter.

UPDATE: Special @goal tag

IF you're among those of Sandy's clients who have already set a goal (Click the "Customize" link on your Daily Digest page at http://iwantsandy.com/home) and are having Sandy keep it front-and-center, you'll love the new @goal tag. Simply tag something with @goal and it'll replace your prior goal and appear in both the web and email versions of your digest. For example:

> Remember "The difference between theory and practice is far greater in practice than in theory" @goal

Portrait of the entrepreneur as a Simpson

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Originally uploaded by raelity

On programming as both sculpture and stonemasonry

“In every block of marble I see a statue as plain as though it stood before me, shaped and perfect in attitude and action. I have only to hew away the rough walls that imprison the lovely apparition to reveal it to the other eyes as mine see it.” —Michelangelo

We programmers and engineers aren't so lucky as to find free-standing virtual marble blocks ready for the sculpting. We must first build up the marble block itself until it shows sufficient promise and only then start chipping away to reveal our product's true form.

iBose again

A shout out to Rob Griffiths over at Macworld's iPhone Central for closing my iPhone + Bose open loop and tuning up my productivity with a simple-yet-not-less-fabulous feat of headphone surgery.

Sandy's blogging!

Sandy, our new email assistant, is hard at work learning the ins-and-outs of human email interaction. But despite her busy schedule, she found time to launch a blog.