You've got MAIL!
I was reading a pretty entertaining piece arguing that most applications (and productivity apps in particular) were in need of a small scale revolution ("remix" sounds cooler, but whatever).
After spending "nearly a decade" studying email and how people use it, the IBM Collaborative User Experience guys came up with Remail, their take at a what a next-gen email client could look like. It's got lots of fancy features, and it looks *more* laborious to use than simpler incarnations like Outlook Express or Thunderbird.
The one feature I love in modern client are saved-search folders: a really easy, really flexible way to present information, it stays out of your way should you happen to prefer the old-school way of working with email, but helps you get a detailed, synoptic way of what's going on in your inbox without forcing you to do all the work (classifying mails, or inputing meta-data so your client can do it for you).
Mail classification and metadata input are comparably boring, repetitive tasks, but metadata is not limited to email: the average PIM software makes extensive use of it.
Of course you see where I'm going: can't we implement some sort of saved criterion sorting for agenda and todo items? It seems pretty hard to implement with todo's (it flies in the face of context-lists and hierarchical lists), but for something like switching event colors, it could very well prove useful.
Another feature of modern mail clients is bayesian filtering, which can also be used for sorting (pdf): this presents a pretty good opportunity to improve PIM software (in addition or combination with user-defined searches), but it's unlikely to get implemented anytime soon. Bayesian sorting offers one great advantage to the email saved-search folders I talked about above: users can actually dump emails in a bayesian-sorted folder, which you can't do with a search folder (it's just a container for a search's results).
After spending "nearly a decade" studying email and how people use it, the IBM Collaborative User Experience guys came up with Remail, their take at a what a next-gen email client could look like. It's got lots of fancy features, and it looks *more* laborious to use than simpler incarnations like Outlook Express or Thunderbird.
The one feature I love in modern client are saved-search folders: a really easy, really flexible way to present information, it stays out of your way should you happen to prefer the old-school way of working with email, but helps you get a detailed, synoptic way of what's going on in your inbox without forcing you to do all the work (classifying mails, or inputing meta-data so your client can do it for you).
Mail classification and metadata input are comparably boring, repetitive tasks, but metadata is not limited to email: the average PIM software makes extensive use of it.
Of course you see where I'm going: can't we implement some sort of saved criterion sorting for agenda and todo items? It seems pretty hard to implement with todo's (it flies in the face of context-lists and hierarchical lists), but for something like switching event colors, it could very well prove useful.
Another feature of modern mail clients is bayesian filtering, which can also be used for sorting (pdf): this presents a pretty good opportunity to improve PIM software (in addition or combination with user-defined searches), but it's unlikely to get implemented anytime soon. Bayesian sorting offers one great advantage to the email saved-search folders I talked about above: users can actually dump emails in a bayesian-sorted folder, which you can't do with a search folder (it's just a container for a search's results).
posted by Benoit Gariod at
23:43
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