121–130 of 222 posts
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been wishing there was a layer between my phone and me that said, effectively, "You've reached David's phone - if this is an emergency or he's expecting your call, press 1; otherwise, press 2 to set up an appointment for a later call, or 3 leave a voicemail message." Where 2 would talk to my calendar and ideally their calendar and figure out a time that works for both of us without my involvement. Sure, people c…
with gvoice, people can leave a voicemail that gets transcripted (vaguely) and texted to me. I glance at the text and decide if I want to call them back or not.
LOL, this looks identical to Sparrow!
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 already exists to a large extent on my iPhone as far as sending outbound messages. I don't know about you, but when I want to email/call/sms/mms/videochat etc say, my father, I don't goto those apps. I just hit the 'home' button on my phone to bring up unified search, type 'dad' and get his contact page allowing me to instantly choose any one of those options to message him. Email, short message, video, phone call, -it's all right there.
If you wanted to take it to the next level, you'd want to be able to open up the API so you could toss in Fb, Twitter, or whatever other services you want on that page to choose from.
The unified UI is basically there already though.
It gets harder when we talk about incoming messages though, because we've got different senders pushing different types of messages to us on a vast array of different platforms and technologies. But isn't this what 'notification centers' are? A single point that unifies and corrals your collection of different incoming messages? And now Apple is merging their iOS notifications with OSX, syncing through the cloud. I agree it's not pretty yet, but we are getting closer, -like I said, I strictly use a unified message UI for sending outbound messages for most of my day.
I think this merging of central messaging UIs that are synced across operating systems will become more refined (so much room for improvement), but will definitely get there. But at the end of the day we're still funneling data from a wide range of different apps in order to present it as best we can keeping both form and function in mind.
edit: s/early 90s/late 80s/
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…
I realise that this may sound like I'm descending into fanboyism, but this is actually something that annoys me about iOS- it's far, far too app-centric. Take Windows Phone for example: tap a contact in WP and you see their tweets, Facebook messages, your SMS and e-mail history with them. The messages app integrates SMS and Live chat seamlessly. Ideally this system would open up to allow any third party to plug into…
I comfortably ignore any comments about email and what it should be from anyone who hasn't used a text email client (well configured) like mutt, mh, elm, or an emacs mode for at least 100 hours. The only real complaints I have about email with a well-configured text client are: * HTML mail from idiots * Syncing on multiple machines, with offline mode (IMAP is ok, but you want to keep full repositories on laptops for…
I'll add: the same highly-formatted emails are very likely to break horribly on handheld devices as well, which are pretty much limited to presenting a small amount of information with minimal formatting -- normal, italic, bold, and possibly some colored text.
And dittos on K9Mail.
For IMAP: offlineimap seems to be a good solution (though not so much on mobile).
Directories: really should be a solved problem by now. I still find myself generally maintaining my own .mail-aliases list though.
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…
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.
I had to switch browsers and start doing NoScript Bingo until the damned page rendered.
I want those 60 seconds of my life back. It wasn't worth it.