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Show HN: Mail Studio – IDE for designing responsive emails

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Re: Show HN: Mail Studio – IDE for designing responsive emails

#201

Post by dnh44 »

D13Fd wrote: post #43
dnh44 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks really useful and the rationale behind using Electron makes sense, but I really dislike using non-native macOS apps. Still, I suppose it's better than not being able to run it at all. Good luck with the project!

Honestly using VS Code and Teams every day has convinced me that Electron apps are a net good. It's incredibly convenient that both of those apps work essentially identically on Mac & PC, and the Mac OS apps maintain feature parity with the PC versions. This is such a nice change, after years and years of bizarro-world Mac apps that have slowly become out-of-date, weird, or slow compared to the PC versions (ahem, Mic…

I can understand the sentiment that they’re a net good but our experiences and workflows with Teams is vastly different.

When I use Teams I have to pretty much close every other open app I have; then I use Teams; then I close Teams and go back to work. If I don’t do this my keystrokes lag by about 2 seconds.

My computer isn’t even that old, it’s from 2016.

Personally I think it would be a tragedy for macOS users if Omni went non native but I suspect we’re going to see more native software in the future not less.

Re: Show HN: Mail Studio – IDE for designing responsive emails

#202

Post by Seirdy »

andylynch wrote: post #50
inetknght wrote: post #30

Any HTML email that arrives to my inbox is usually marked as spam and phishing. Emails need to be clear and concise. HTML facilitates far too much hidden shit.

As someone who lies in Excel, Outlook and too many different chat apps I think it’s far too useful to have proper formatted text in communications - Even very simple things like highlighting, tables, screenshots just don’t work or are unclear if you limit yourself to plain text. Marketing emails can be annoying but that’s what the unsubscribe button is for ;)

We have asterisks for emphasis , attachments for screenshots, and bulleted lists for a subset of tables. More complex tables and formatting probably work better in an attachment; the message body should be clear, concise, and render correctly in the recipient's mail client. When the body contains complex HTML, there's a good chance it'll render incorrectly in someone else's client.

Allowing fewer features is a feature in itself: when we try to allow everything without thinking about the consequences, we end up with something like the modern Web or Electron apps.

Re: Show HN: Mail Studio – IDE for designing responsive emails

#203

Post by Seirdy »

heroic wrote: post #104
signal11 wrote: post #49

An email user's viewpoint: pretty emails formatted like web pages (e.g., like what GOG.com sends) may provide a sense of accomplishment to the designer, and their employer a warm, fuzzy, Brand-CompliantTM feeling -- but as a user I kind of like emails that are just... messages. With hyperlinks if it's appropriate. Images aren't always a great idea -- lots of clients block them by default. Why not have just text in pa…

Almost always, for such emails, you are not the audience. We've done multiple tests to check which emails perform better for our customers, and always ones with a lot more visual imagery, heavily HTMLized emails work better than just text and links. Our understanding for this has been that people are not very email savvy, and for them the visual imagery works more like story telling.

What were the privacy implications of these tests?

Did your findings that email-savvy users were insignificant account for the fact that this subset of users probably disabled any email tracking in the first place?

I'm finding that technical users are excluded by corporate interests increasingly often. I suppose this might be a good thing, but I still find the underlying attitudes towards them frustrating.

Re: Show HN: Mail Studio – IDE for designing responsive emails

#204

Post by Seirdy »

krsdcbl wrote: post #96
signal11 wrote: post #49

An email user's viewpoint: pretty emails formatted like web pages (e.g., like what GOG.com sends) may provide a sense of accomplishment to the designer, and their employer a warm, fuzzy, Brand-CompliantTM feeling -- but as a user I kind of like emails that are just... messages. With hyperlinks if it's appropriate. Images aren't always a great idea -- lots of clients block them by default. Why not have just text in pa…

I believe the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Personally I very much share your purist view here, BUT i also find barely formatted plain text marketing emails highly suspicious and tend to filter them out as scam subconsciously. Don't overload your communication, that is right. But also don't neglect your design and branding. It's easy to think plain text is better when coming from a technical background with pro…

Plain text or unformatted email, in my experience, is more likely to have come from an actual person who genuinely wants to send me something. Heavily formatted emails optimized for user manipulation ("engagement") are typically sent by marketing departments who want to sell me something and can be safely discarded and added to my killfile.

I typically recommend all my friends to do the same, and many of them already do. How do you think most people react when they see a banner saying "Would you like to load remote images? [yes] [no]"?

Re: Show HN: Mail Studio – IDE for designing responsive emails

#205

Post by Seirdy »

hedora wrote: post #97
saos wrote: post #91

Its very ninche tbh. I think more needs to be done to empower marketers who don't really care about HTML. I know the web and email and different but its just crazy how slow email is. Its still 10 years behind stuck using layouts. Just insane. Microsoft for starters should stop with actionable emails and start supportingbasic semantic HTML and CSS3 in all their clients.

100% of carefully formatted HTML email is spam. There’s no client side demand for better spam renderers. The only reason web browsers are on the surveillance capitalism treadmill is that people are essentially forced to continually upgrade to the newest, shiniest version, since stuff like banking and shopping break otherwise. If anything, I want my email client to support less of HTML. I already have images (and, I h…

> Heck, I wish there was an open, simplified HTML news renderer where there is no JavaScript or tracking, and publishers target it directly

Sounds like you want an RSS reader.

Re: Show HN: Mail Studio – IDE for designing responsive emails

#206

Post by D13Fd »

dnh44 wrote: post #201
D13Fd wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly using VS Code and Teams every day has convinced me that Electron apps are a net good. It's incredibly convenient that both of those apps work essentially identically on Mac & PC, and the Mac OS apps maintain feature parity with the PC versions. This is such a nice change, after years and years of bizarro-world Mac apps that have slowly become out-of-date, weird, or slow compared to the PC versions (ahem, Mic…

I can understand the sentiment that they’re a net good but our experiences and workflows with Teams is vastly different. When I use Teams I have to pretty much close every other open app I have; then I use Teams; then I close Teams and go back to work. If I don’t do this my keystrokes lag by about 2 seconds. My computer isn’t even that old, it’s from 2016. Personally I think it would be a tragedy for macOS users if O…

I mean, I've used Teams on a few Macs and never had that problem. I wouldn't assume that applies to every user. Also, millions of people seem to be using VS Code just fine.

Re: Show HN: Mail Studio – IDE for designing responsive emails

#207

Post by girvo »

WrathOfJay wrote: post #175
dijit wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always assumed this was intentionally done this way so that people click the “display external content” warning and inadvertently activate the tracking pixels.

IIRC, that was the exact argument for disabling image loading when it was first introduced. The responsible thing for services like gmail and o365 to do would be to eat the resource costs and just open ALL external content within a privacy sandbox, thereby polluting the data. Then you can re-enable displaying of images for everyone and the experience for designers and end users gets better.

Gmail does exactly that, I believe? It proxies the external resources to hide your IP.

What it can’t do sadly is strip out tracking functions (unique IDs and such). Dunno how that could even be solved tbh

Re: Show HN: Mail Studio – IDE for designing responsive emails

#208

Post by dnh44 »

D13Fd wrote: post #206
dnh44 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can understand the sentiment that they’re a net good but our experiences and workflows with Teams is vastly different. When I use Teams I have to pretty much close every other open app I have; then I use Teams; then I close Teams and go back to work. If I don’t do this my keystrokes lag by about 2 seconds. My computer isn’t even that old, it’s from 2016. Personally I think it would be a tragedy for macOS users if O…

I mean, I've used Teams on a few Macs and never had that problem. I wouldn't assume that applies to every user. Also, millions of people seem to be using VS Code just fine.

I don't assume that it does, but the performance issues with Electron are widely acknowledged, as is the the fact that MS seems to have done a great job with VSC despite that.

Re: Show HN: Mail Studio – IDE for designing responsive emails

#209

Post by inetknght »

jeroenhd wrote: post #199
inetknght wrote: post #30

Any HTML email that arrives to my inbox is usually marked as spam and phishing. Emails need to be clear and concise. HTML facilitates far too much hidden shit.

I think this is, aside from the security concerns, why many chat applications, forums and tools like Github/Gitlab have switched to standards like Markdown for text formatting. I can see the value in linking, embedding images, highlighting through bold and italic text, and underlining. Even code can be useful inside an email. Markdown or a similar language would serve most people very well, much better than HTML. Non…

If emails were written and parsed as markdown, I might (!) change my opinion about it. But HTML is vastly too feature-rich to be sane. I think showing images inline (such as in Github-flavored Markdown) is still too feature-rich. But lists, tables, monospaced blocks, italic, bold ... these are fine. Embedded images aren't conducive to being parsed by a script.

Re: Show HN: Mail Studio – IDE for designing responsive emails

#210

Post by D13Fd »

dnh44 wrote: post #208
D13Fd wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, I've used Teams on a few Macs and never had that problem. I wouldn't assume that applies to every user. Also, millions of people seem to be using VS Code just fine.

I don't assume that it does, but the performance issues with Electron are widely acknowledged, as is the the fact that MS seems to have done a great job with VSC despite that.

Yeah. It sounds like we can at least agree that VS code shows that with enough effort a company can make a performant cross-platform app with a consistent UI and near-perfect feature parity. It's basically cross-platform nirvana.
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