michael-mccracken.net

Updates from July, 2007

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  Processing Email

  mike 12:11 pm on July 26, 2007 | 2 Permalink
  

  I watched Merlin Mann’s Google Tech Talk about processing email yesterday, and even though I’d followed his posts on Inbox Zero when they came out, it’s good to get a reminder, and Merlin’s an entertaining speaker – I recommend you watch it.

  He talks about strategies for keeping an empty inbox based on processing email as it comes in, and deciding what to do with each message as you read it so nothing just sits there reminding you of vague, unspecified amounts of work you need to deal with sometime.

  You may have to accept on faith that an empty inbox is a worthwhile goal. Some people disagree, but I think it’s safe to say that for most people, moving the things you get as email into more appropriate places like notes apps, calendars or to-do lists is a great way to get in control of your work. Process it, then get to work. I’ve been doing this for a while, and it’s a good feeling to know you don’t have any surprises laying forgotten in old mail.

  One point from Merlin’s talk that I’d like to comment on is that email is just a medium, and it’s worth thinking about whether it’s really the best medium for what you’re trying to do. This has been in my mind lately as I’ve been working on a project with a series of parallel email-based heavily technical conversations, sometimes with three or four people replying every couple of minutes. I struggle with the feeling that email is just not the best way to do this, but it seems like the only way to include everyone.

  Merlin made the point that sometimes email dysfunction is just a symptom of an organizational communications problem, and no amount of email system adjustment can solve it. I agree – if you’re really just tracking bugs, use a bug tracker. If you’re coordinating things in real time, use IMs or IRC. If you’re collaborating on a document, use something like Google Docs. Please stop overloading email.

   

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• 

  Free advice about a pro email client

  mike 9:54 am on July 6, 2007 | 4 Permalink
  

  If you’re thinking of writing a commercially successful pro email client for Mac OS X, here’s some advice along the lines of what I wrote yesterday:

  Make sure you’ve tried a lot of email clients. Try everything you can get your hands on. Really use each one – figure out what makes it different, and what makes it powerful. Make sure you’ve tried text-only clients like mutt and pine. Lots of your target audience refuses to give those up – figure out why. Don’t just try free alternatives – peek in on big-business. Fire up Parallels and try Outlook and Notes in Windows (there may be others that are even better examples). Read up on the Chandler project.

  Make sure the email is always available in an open data format. If this isn’t obvious, you should probably stay home. Keep a backup copy of email in something Apple Mail can read – like Unix mbox files. You can use a database for tags and whatever, but there had better be mbox files around, because your target audience won’t move into an app they can’t move out of.

  Don’t start out by cloning Apple Mail. If your first screenshot looks almost like Mail but does less or isn’t as pretty, it’s bad news. Mail is a big program with lots of time and effort behind it. If you try to match its feature list first before you make your client unique, you’re toast.

  Pick a specific customer, and get to know their email problem. Why not clone Apple Mail? Because you’re not writing for the same customer, are you? Make sure you know who your customer is, and what they actually need. People who want a pro app probably already have a system for to-do lists & notes, so your client doesn’t need to match those features. Likewise, email pros can still use Mail to send slideshows to Mom…

  As an example, since you’re probably a programmer, think about how a programmer’s email client would be different from the standard. Maybe it does syntax highlighting. Maybe you can apply patches people send you with one click. Maybe you can create bugzilla issues from an email with one click. Or collaborate on a support email with the SubEthaEngine. Nobody but programmers will want to use that client, but that’s fine – there are lots of programmers. Now what about music and video editors? Graphic designers? See where I’m going?

   
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  It could work: a 3rd party email client for OS X

  mike 11:25 am on July 5, 2007 | 17 Permalink
  

  Brent Simmons started a discussion yesterday about email apps for OS X. To summarize: Apple Mail doesn’t do enough for everyone, and the alternatives aren’t so great either. But because it is free, there’s no incentive for a third party to do better.

  Paul Kafasis agrees, saying “Don’t compete with Free and Don’t compete with Apple”. He draws the comparison between email apps and browsers, where there is very little money to be made as a result of the many excellent free browsers out there. He also compares the situation to music players – it seems like everyone’s got a pet feature they would add to iTunes, so there ought to be an audience for a couple music players, except competing with iTunes is just not a good business plan.

  I do think there is a market for a pro email client for OS X, and I’ll use another core app category to explain – Text Editors. I think they are a better analogy than music or browsers. Shipping in every Mac, TextEdit is a solid basic free editor, but everyone needs something more. Some people need styles, grammar checking, layout control, and graphics – so they move to Word, Pages, or OpenOffice.org. Clearly, there’s money to be made there, if only by Microsoft. Other people need regex search and replace, code completion, syntax checking, block editing, etc. – so they move on to a programmer’s editor. How is the market for programmer’s editors? XCode is free and very good, emacs, vim, etc. are also free and excellent. But there are people making money selling text editors. People buy BBEdit, TextMate, and SubEthaEdit because these programs have important features that give you more power over something that they do all day. TextMate is my favorite example here, because it benefits from community involvement with bundles and plugins to customize and add power.

  Does that sound familiar? It should – many of us spend more time than we’d like reading and answering email. For some, it’s their whole job. An email client that had unique and compelling features for professionals, knew its audience, had strong Mac-like design, and supported community extension, would be successful, just like TextMate.

  Imagine if there was just a single bundled text editor for Macs, and we had to use it for writing everything from programming to business reports to family letters. Wouldn’t it be annoying when an update came around and they added stationery and voice notes when you wanted refactoring support and better version-control integration? “Email client” isn’t just a single app category, and it’s about time someone realized it.

   
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  The read-once email client and reference emails

  mike 2:58 pm on June 8, 2007 | 4 Permalink
  

  I’ve been dreaming of a new kind of email client, one that only lets you look at a new email once. That’s right – you get to scan it for 30 seconds and then you have to do something with it or it gets archived out of sight. And you can only look at one email at a time. I think it’d be a great way to focus on getting your inbox empty and doing something useful with each message.

  Doing something would be replying to it, archiving or deleting it, creating a todo about it or sending it to a notes program for reference. I really think that last one’s important: Email clients aren’t for storing notes – send it somewhere else where you can link it up and annotate it more easily.

  I don’t have any suggestions about how to make your email client do this, but I have come up with something for making reference emails more useful, using VoodooPad.

  I’ve been using Mail Act-On as described by Merlin Mann to quickly move messages to appropriate mailboxes, and I’ve been able to keep a clean inbox. But – I never bother to look at the emails I send to the reference folder. They’re basically useless without more context.

  I just wrote a quick script to send selected emails to voodoopad as a new page so I can link to them, add notes, and then later, search those reference emails in the same context as my notes. It’s already made a big difference in how useful emails are – I can add comments to myself, find related notes in my VP doc, and since there’s now a URL for every page in my VP docs, I can even link to reference emails from outside of VP – like in iGTD.

  If you’re interested in the script, it’s here: NewVPPageFromEmail.scpt (control-click and save-as).