Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Shortwave: Enjoy Your Inbox

shortwave.com

1–10 of 135 posts

Show HN: Shortwave: Enjoy Your Inbox

#1
I’m thrilled to finally be able to show everyone what we’ve been working on for the last 2 years. We’re re-inventing the email experience to help you email smarter and faster, so you can get more done, and maybe even actually enjoy your inbox.

When we launched Firebase here 10 years ago, HN was tough but fair, and I expect no less this time around! I hope you’ll check out what we’ve built and share your feedback. I’ll be around here all day and am happy to answer any questions. Let us know what you think!

Show HN: Shortwave: Enjoy Your Inbox
shortwave.com

Re: Show HN: Shortwave: Enjoy Your Inbox

#2
Always great to see people innovating on email clients, everyone is different and would have they own best way to manage their email for themselves. So any new option is always good.

Out of interest, you have started with Gmail which is understandable but do you have planes to support order email services or even just plain IMAP?

I know Gmail is complicated as it doesn't really do IMAP properly and so it better to use their api, so you have to chose one of the other to start. But I hope you have plans to support IMAP.

Re: Show HN: Shortwave: Enjoy Your Inbox

#6

Always great to see people innovating on email clients, everyone is different and would have they own best way to manage their email for themselves. So any new option is always good. Out of interest, you have started with Gmail which is understandable but do you have planes to support order email services or even just plain IMAP? I know Gmail is complicated as it doesn't really do IMAP properly and so it better to us…

We would very much like to support other services in the future.

Rather than using IMAP, we integrate with Gmail's APIs from our servers. This allows us to have a new client-server protocol that supports a bunch of new stuff -- like faster real-time updates, better latency compensation and offline handling, bundled inboxes, more interesting triage flows, emoji reactions, presence, etc.

The downside of this is obviously that we have to do a customer integration with Gmail to do this. But fortunately it's not too complex, and we intend to support other services in the future. And maybe, in the _long term_, improve the protocols so this integration can be more standard.

Re: Show HN: Shortwave: Enjoy Your Inbox

#7
post #5

This layout and color palette are strongly evocative of Inbox. Without knowing anything about your company, I'd presume you're trying to recreate Inbox. Is that intentional?

Many of us were Inbox users and miss it! We're trying to do more than Inbox did, but we were certainly inspired be it :)

Re: Show HN: Shortwave: Enjoy Your Inbox

#8
post #3

We need this but not for Google. What's the point of a nice inbox when you are getting spied on and sold to advertisers?

One has nothing to do with the other. I would like a nice inbox for my Gmail, despite not caring about being spied on and my info being sold. I'm not alone, judging by the amount of folks that wax nostalgic about Google's Inbox.

Re: Show HN: Shortwave: Enjoy Your Inbox

#9
No thank you.. all these apps either want gmail way too many gmail permissions, and/or are hosted.

I know the other solution is (currently) IMAP, but that's just fine.. You could use the messageids to create the extra functionality. Some solutions use IMAP folders, which is a pain in the ass. Also... I'm trying to get rid of gmail lol

Congrats on launching though, but it's not for me.

Re: Show HN: Shortwave: Enjoy Your Inbox

#10
Love email apps! Congrats.

Honestly, it will be really hard get me to leave Front. I have never used a more productive app for my personal workflow - especially with a team.

This is seriously super awesome though. Some misc. feedback/comments:

- Front has Team Comments (private and between email messages) that are pure gold for collaborating responses and sharing drafts / notes.

- What you all have here with Grouping or "Bundles" is top shelf. Especially the interface and speed of things. I actually tried to get Front to add this in some one off survey two years ago. This allows such a better UX layer of organization than Tags/Folders or Merging emails. Seriously bravo and perfect.

- It's not clear if there's a way to manually create a Bundle. For example, I once asked a client to send me 15 photos, they sent it over 15 emails. I would like to manually "Bundle" and merge those emails basically forever. Edit: Apparently you can drag to do this... superb.

- Team Inboxes are really useful and I am trying to figure out if Bundles kind of replaces this.

- Don't care for Workspaces at all from what I can tell. Maybe my team is too small though. Just don't care for chat that much / use other stuff.

- Beyond Bundles, an almost Trello style organization for flow on "Bundles" could be useful as another layer. Attaching a screenshot of how I do it in Front from start of project to end of project life: https://imgur.com/a/eJ73oDF

- Front is a total mess when it comes to Tags vs Folders and Emojis. What you all have here is really gorgeous. Prop to design team as you can tell this was extremely thoughtful.

- Personally don't care for the gif or emoji stuff since email (to me at least) has always been a formal form of communication.

Post reply on HN