Jing and Sandy

The past few days I've been trying out two new apps that look to be very useful.

First is Jing a great screen and video capture application. I've tried a number of free programs that will record your screen and save them as an SWF file, but this one really works. I'm amazed that it doesn't seem to eat up system resources like others I've tried. You can record video and audio and the generated SWF file plays back perfectly.

The other tool is I Want Sandy. No that's not an X rated site. Sandy is your personal assistant. You can use your email to send her very simple commands to remind you of appointments, todo items and people's contact information. She sets them all up on a calendar for you and can remind you via email, SMS or Twitter. It's easy to set up recurring reminders and appointments and she'll even send the item back to you with a vcal attachment so you can easily add it to your preferred calendar application. On top of all that she'll email your daily schedule every morning. It's as simple as sending her an email like: Remind me I have a doctors appointment at 3:30 PM on Jan 5th. Or: Remember Connie's birthday on Feb 17th @yearly... this will set a yearly reminder.

Since most of my daily communication is done via email, it's just so easy to quickly type and send a message to Sandy. I think this could become my preferred method for managing todo's and reminders.