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Re-Designing the classic email client

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Re: Re-Designing the classic email client

#41

Post by dpark »

Tyrannosaurs wrote: post #23
hapless wrote: post #8

This guy has teeny tiny letters hardcoded into JPGs on his web site. I can't read it. Fortunately, this means I can disregard what he has to say about UI/UX. Sometimes the medium IS the message.

Any other areas of your life where you throw the baby out with the bath water? Someone over salt some food so you assume that everything they say or do with food is wrong? Refuse to ever get a lift with a friend because they forgot to indicate once so obviously they can't be trusted to drive? I'm not wild about the way he's presented his website but I'm still willing to look at his ideas about e-mail workflow with an…

If someone wants to talk to me about proper seasoning while deliberately dumping a box of kosher salt onto some eggs, yeah, I'm going to assume they have no idea what they're talking about.

Re: Re-Designing the classic email client

#42

Post by nicholassmith »

I've been through mail clients for a while now, and I've even written one. The thing I realised is, even when it does exactly what I want I'm still burdened by the fact that for my needs email sucks, so I've managed to move a lot of work stuff to things like Asana for project management, and the email side of it is pretty much for junk and occasional correspondence.

Re: Re-Designing the classic email client

#43

Post by moeffju »

Sparrow is so close to this. All it's lacking is the all-attachments view and the prioritizing, but you can hack the prioritizing easily enough with Gmail labels. Even then, I don't think that's enough, though. I think e-mail nowadays needs to be more of a TODO manager and less about messaging.

Re: Re-Designing the classic email client

#44

Post by ineedtosleep »

podperson wrote: post #36

Don't fix email. Fix communication. Why, on my iPhone, do I have: 1. An email app (which required a major update to unite mail boxes) 2. A "messages" app (which abstracts out two different message systems) 3. A phone app 4. A contacts app 5. Twitter 6. Facebook 7. Skype What I want to do is (a) send messages to people (I don't care how), (b) check messages I've received (from anyone, using any method), (c) manage my…

> Tiny incremental improvements to email will only nibble at the edges of the larger problem. Let me communicate with a unified UI and unified contacts.

Isn't that Google's main intent with integrating Google Voice onto phones? The recipient use case seems to work well under the Google apps where Google Voice shows your SMS and voicemails, a quick click would bring you to Gmail. The only issue I see here, is that I that I don't believe there is a cross-app indicator of new email (excluding extensions and external apps).

Re: Re-Designing the classic email client

#45

Post by onli »

tambourine_man wrote: post #21
ben0x539 wrote: post #5

holy shit just write your web pages in html, not everything needs to be a crazy javascript abomination where the body text fades in slowly

If it falls back gracefully, why not? As pointed by others, the site just is a bunch of JPEGs, which is a very bad choice indeed (accessibility, search engine access, speed, etc). But aesthetics do matter. If done properly, you could just grab the content and use your favority reader with a click of a button in case you desagree with the author's taste.

>If it falls back gracefully, why not?

It doesn't. Content doesn't load here on a FF with js disabled (not that i do this normally, disable JS, just tested it because of your comment).

I think it kind of matters in this case. The "mail has to be repaired" is such an overused term, and seldom the people claiming that even try to give reasons for this ruling. Mail is an asynchronic system for letting people send messages (with attachments) and it works really well. If someone fails to see that, claiming something is broken which most probably isn't and is doing that from a technically broken site, it weakens his point even further.

So mentioning the observation isn't totally out of place.

Re: Re-Designing the classic email client

#46

Post by _urga »

brianlovin wrote: post #14

Is there anything out there right now that handles email attachments like described in this pitch? I would love the ability to see all the attachments ever sent to me, organized by date/sender/filetype. Or clicking on a contact and seeing all attachments I've shared with that person.

Brian, am working on something like that, please leave your email address at https://ronomon.com to be notified when ready.

Re: Re-Designing the classic email client

#47

Post by bmelton »

inetsee wrote: post #16
Flimm wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having the web page fade in slowly gives the impression of speed. It's not just a fancy gimmick.

I ran a website speed test on this page; it performed very poorly (load time more than 14 seconds). Personally, I'd rather see websites with real speed, rather than something pretty that just has the impression of speed. In my opinion, having a web page fade in is just a gimmick.

In all fairness, running a speed test against a site that is currently on the front page of HN is a little bit of a stacked deck, isn't it?

Re: Re-Designing the classic email client

#48

Post by ThomPete »

hapless wrote: post #8

This guy has teeny tiny letters hardcoded into JPGs on his web site. I can't read it. Fortunately, this means I can disregard what he has to say about UI/UX. Sometimes the medium IS the message.

Perhaps you aren't supposed to read them but instead the text in the HTML?

Re: Re-Designing the classic email client

#49

Post by [deleted] »

podperson wrote: post #36

Don't fix email. Fix communication. Why, on my iPhone, do I have: 1. An email app (which required a major update to unite mail boxes) 2. A "messages" app (which abstracts out two different message systems) 3. A phone app 4. A contacts app 5. Twitter 6. Facebook 7. Skype What I want to do is (a) send messages to people (I don't care how), (b) check messages I've received (from anyone, using any method), (c) manage my…

[deleted]

Re: Re-Designing the classic email client

#50

Post by jyou »

podperson wrote: post #36

Don't fix email. Fix communication. Why, on my iPhone, do I have: 1. An email app (which required a major update to unite mail boxes) 2. A "messages" app (which abstracts out two different message systems) 3. A phone app 4. A contacts app 5. Twitter 6. Facebook 7. Skype What I want to do is (a) send messages to people (I don't care how), (b) check messages I've received (from anyone, using any method), (c) manage my…

this is great point!
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