The Later Box

There have been quite a few email applications introduced into the iOS ecosphere in recent months.

Mailbox, Mail Pilot and Triage are three of the apps that I've tried. Each has a focus on managing your email in new ways -- primarily they present ways to wade through your Inbox quickly and efficiently with a focus on action.

Mailbox has the ability to flag emails for later, set a timer or date for them to appear again, archive etc. It is an elegant and fast way to do things and I liked it a lot. Mail Pilot takes the same tack but takes Mailbox a step further, working with IMAP mail services beyond just Gmail. Truthfully, I loved Mailbox. If it worked with mail accounts other than Gmail, I would still be using it.

I found that Mail Pilot, despite the premium price compared to its compatriots ($15), delivered a spotty implementations. It was sluggish, slow to refresh and moving a piece of email often left it in a state of limbo. Moving email to an archive and searching for it later, was a crapshoot. Sometimes the email was just gone, only to show up later without any explanation. I'm sure it was related to syncing everything back and forth between the iPhone/iPad, the IMAP account and my mail client (in this case Mail.app). It also used a folder/filing structure that ended up getting quite Byzantine after a few days of use. This was hidden from the user on iOS but I go back and forth between my iPhone, iPad and MacBook Air and having to search through a dozen folders to find out where Mail Pilot decided to file something was less than ideal. Eventually, I would be able to track down the wayward email but it was a lot of wasted cycles and worry.

The aforementioned Byzantine file structure presented another problem in that it left my email account cluttered with empty folders. Maybe it eventually cleans them up but I didn't stick around long enough to find out. I'll check back on it after a few updates.

Triage was something I heard about on ADN. I was pointed to a Viticci article (as I often am) and I got me interested enough to try it. Triage is simple. You hook it up to your IMAP account and you have two gestures to work with - Up (mapped to Delete in my case) and Down (mapped to Keep). Flicking up will throw the email into my Deleted Items folder and flicking down will leave the email alone, unread in my Inbox. Conveniently, it no longer will show up in Triage when marked as Keep. Why they don't allow user-mappable gestures to the cardinal directions I'll never know. If it did, my problems would be solved and this post would be over. Still, it comes close to what I need.

What Mailbox pointed out to me is that I need is a Later box. A place to stick emails that I don't want jamming up my Inbox but I really do need to act on "later". Ideally, the number of emails flagged in this way should be relatively few. If it is more than a handful, it is probably pointing to a different kind of problem -- the last thing I need is an interim archive. I need two things -- a place to hold emails until I return to my Mac and the discipline and discernment to act on them when I get there.

To solve my problem, I employed a mishmash of tools and techniques (as I do). First, I created a Later folder on my Fastmail IMAP account. If an email came that I couldn't respond to immediately, I would use Sparrow on my iPhone and move it to that folder. Sparrow thankfully makes this painless and fast. Problem solved? Not quite.

The new problem was that I never checked the Later box. Things would go into a limbo state and I'd only remember to check it every few days. It ended up causing more friction than it was meant to solve. What I needed was something that did what Mailbox did so well; when a trigger event occurred, it would move the email back to the Inbox. This move was essentially flagging the email to indicate that the email needed to be dealt with again.

As so often happens, Keyboard Maestro offered a solution. On my Mac Mini "mail robot" (if you don't have a Mac Mini home server, you're missing out -- those things are really useful), I set up a Keyboard Maestro macro that selected anything in the Later box and moved it to the Inbox every day at 7:30PM. The result is a flexible and extensible workflow that simulates what Mailbox does except with my Fastmail account. Problem solved for now.

My mail setup isn't perfect yet. If Triage had a left and right swipe action, I could map them to "Later" and "Archive". That would be quite convenient but, alas, this will have to do for now.

Here's how it works -- mail comes into my Inbox throughout the day and I quickly delete the stuff that I don't care about using Triage. After deletion, there are usually just a few emails in here. The rest of my processing happens in Sparrow when I have a bigger chunk of time. If an email shows up that I need to hang on to (like a receipt) I can quickly send it to my Archive. If it is something I need to reply to, I do it right then and there. If it requires more thought or will take more than a few sentences, I send it to my Later box for when I get home. Every night, all of the things I deferred throughout the day appear in my Inbox at 7:30PM.

It is not elegant. In fact, its annoying and kludgey. There are too many steps and it involves too many apps. The main advantage the whole messy process confers, however, is that I have a clean Inbox throughout the day which allows me to speed through my email quickly when I get a spare moment . It also wastes a minimum of brain cycles thinking about how to deal with each one. That should do for now but I'll still hold out hope that Mailbox will one day work with IMAP accounts or that Triage will eventually support a couple more speedy gestures.

Follow Up 5/10/2013:

I changed the automation to just call some simple Applescript which was more efficient and runs more consistently. Here's what I used.

tell application "Mail" to move messages of mailbox "INBOX/Later"  of account "Fastmail" to mailbox "INBOX" of account "Fastmail"

Put that in a time-triggered Keyboard Maestro macro and you're golden.

Switching From Google

When Google announced that they were shuttering Reader it made me take stock of how I felt about the company and how I interacted with them. I looked around and saw how heavily invested I had become and, over time, had been completely reliant and reservedly trusting of their services -- specifically Gmail and Google Calendar.

The Reader shutdown is the last in a line of events that underlined the fact that Google's interests and mine were diverging. When they were innovating with interesting technology like Google Wave[1] or Google Voice or taking the lead with a centralized and better solutions like Google Reader, Gmail or Gchat, they always seemed to be pushing the boundaries of what could be done on the web and focused on making it better.

But somewhere during the rise of Facebook, things began to change. Google's focus was on ad revenue and how to monetize these great base technologies they had helped create and foster. Their focus shifted subtly at first and I was forced to ask the question more and more "I am willing to give up access to my personal information for this product? Is it really that good?"

In most cases, the answer was "yes". Gmail really was that good. It was a killer app. Reader really was that good. It centralized hundreds of newsfeeds into one place and a burgeoning ecosystem was built upon it making it easy to read things in one place and have them stay marked as read in another.[2]

My move away from Google has been one borne out of the fact I no longer see them heading in a direction that I want to support. Their products seem confused and ill-focused. I see the main reason being that they no longer are concentrating on just building a great service and sorting out the money bit later; they need to fold that in upfront and it is diffusing their focus on serving people who use their tools and it putting it squarely on serving the companies buying ads to serve to the users of those tools. I understand that companies need to make money, certainly. But since Google's ability to make money is directly proportional to how much access they have to me and my data, this direction change didn't sit well with me.

I started taking steps to extricate myself from their products as much as possible. This wasn't going to be an all-or-nothing thing. I wasn't about to post some indendiary "I am so done with Google!" rant and stop using everything associated with them all at once. This was going to be a reasoned, sensible approach to minimizing my exposure to being disappointed by their current (and no doubt future) product decisions. I didn't want to close the barn doors and burn the barn down. I just wanted to use only the services that were truly helping me. I also wanted to consider the price of taking the path of least resistance with regards to my personal data and the fact that, while in the Google ecosystem, I wasn't using a product -- I was the product.

Calendars

At first, I switched my calendering over to iCloud. It had obvious integration with OS X and Fantastical and the switch was completely painless. In some ways, it was better than dealing with Google Calendar because it is one of the few things that iCloud seems to get right. I still use Google Calendar for shared calendars for specific purposes because it is simply easier when collaborating with others. When it ceases to be easier, I'll probably stop using it in those cases too.

Mail

The second switch was more painful -- mail. I have been a Gmail user since it first launched. I have gigs of data on the service and having access to my archive of communication, combined with Google's fantastically efficient search, has saved my bacon many times.

I couldn't help feeling that I wanted to have more control however. And as much as I used to not believe it, Google's idea of "free" was quickly coming with a price as services I loved went away and services with marginal use were pushed to the fore in ways I found obtrusive and ugly.

After some asking around on ADN for some mail services people like, a name that kept coming up was Fastmail.fm. I did some research into Fastmail and sites like it and ended up thinking Fastmail was a pretty good choice. IMAP support, good security, excellent help documentation, setup guides, and their tech support (I later came to find out) was top notch.

I set up my Gmail accounts to forward to the new Fastmail.fm account and added Fastmail as my main inbox in Sparrow on both iOS and my Macbook Air. Everything went smoothly, the mail started flowing and all looked good.

There were a few things that were a worry when moving away from Gmail though. Looking through my Spam folder, it was clear that Gmail does a great job of trapping most garbage from hitting my inbox. Fastmail has touted anti-spam algorithms but I thought it might be good to take matters into my own hands on this one.

I bought an app called SpamSieve and installed it on my Mac Mini, which serves as a home multimedia/download server among other things. Using the Mini as a mail server drone took some fiddling and testing but I got SpamSieve's Applescripts to work, allowing me to remotely train the Bayesian filters from any of my devices.

After a few weeks of testing, SpamSieve has been nothing short of miraculous and I couldn't be happier with how clean it is keeping my inbox. It has saved me a lot of time in just deleting the marginally-spammy mails. I left the main spam filter running on Fastmail to catch the "v14grA" level spam, but the email equivalent of sales circulars and such are now heading to the Spam filter too. I peruse it daily to make sure thing important is stuck in there but very little has been mis-filed. If it ever is, I just throw it in a "TrainGood" folder and SpamSieve knows to let them through in the future and if junk ever gets into my inbox, I drop it in a "TrainSpam" folder. Both of these actions help tune and train the Bayesian filters in SpamSieve and it just keeps getting better and better.

I shelled out for Mail Pilot on iOS and was hoping to include it in my review of this whole process but Mail Pilot launched having issues with Fastmail IMAP settings. I'm eagerly awaiting a new App store release to try it out since it will apparently address these problems. It has felt like a long wait but with the likes of "invite throttled" apps like Tempo.ai and Mailbox lately, I guess should be used to delayed gratification by now.

Google search is the best. There's really nothing close, although engines like Bing and DuckDuckGo are coming along. In order to give one those other servies a try, I set up DuckDuckGo as my default search in Alfred and Safari on my Mac. The results from DDG have been mixed. Sometimes it is spot on, but other times it is nowhere near as much of a mindreader as Google. I am never sure if that is because it has been scanning my personal life in such detail for so long that it has built a profile that guides the tuning of my results or if I am giving too much credit and they are just generally better at deducing what people are looking for.

Whatever the reason, Google just finds what I want faster and with less spurious links in the result set. I am still going to keep using DuckDuckGo for a while though. I don't think its fair to base my opinion a small sample size of just a few weeks. It is something I'll keep my eye on in the ensuing months.

Social

Google+. What can I say? I tried to like it. I set aside my distaste and distrust when it launched as it tried to create a "better Facebook" but it became apparent quickly that it sucks in all of the ways that Facebook sucks but also sucks in new and different ways as well. In a strange way, the more people that used it, the worse it got. The comments were less thoughtful and more reactive and the anti-Apple vitriol seemed to be the main focus when reading technology-related posts. I kept it around for a while to see what the crowds were saying but when I realize the answer was "nothing", I checked out.

Right now, my main source of social-related activity is ADN. The conversations are far better, the people are more inclined towards civil (and interesting) discourse and there are fantastic apps out there that make use of it (Riposte and Felix are the two best on the iPhone and Kiwi the standout on the Mac).

Twitter is fun too. The main reason I enjoy reading my stream there is Twitterific. It's the best way to read Twitter right now, although Tweetbot on my Mac does yeoman work as well. I wish there was a stream-marker system that crossed apps and platforms that worked consistently but, for now, I just scroll to the top and try not to care so much about what I "missed".

Work in Progress

I realize I have a contrarian streak in me a mile wide and I need to be mindful of that fact as I make decisions like this. Some decisions I've made in the past about apps and services have been impulsive but still were no-brainers[3]. I leave those behind with no regrets. Other decisions however carry some weight that require a bit more introspection. In the scope of things, calls like this seem minor but they bring up serious ideas like digital security, archiving, accessibility, integration and future-proofing. These are the ideas that are worth putting some thought into.

  1. I wish Google Wave was still around. I am still thinking up uses for it. It was hobbled by a slow infrastructure and somewhat inscrutable design but overall it was an entire platform waiting to provide solutions to problems that hadn't taken shape yet. ↩

  2. You can say it killed an ecosystem in doing so but the result was so compelling and useful it hardly mattered to me at the time. ↩

  3. Any app or service that merges with Facebook is something I'll no longer use. Any app or service that requires Facebook in any way (to find friends or integrate "socially") is something I delete immediately. ↩

Alfred2 Workflows

As I mentioned recently, I have switched over to Alfred. I wanted to share a few of the workflows that are currently in daily (hourly?!) use.

The built-in (with the PowerPack) iTunes mini player is really fantastic. You can control iTunes quickly and easily using a few typed commands. I use it all day and it's so much more intuitive than most of the iTunes hotkey systems I've messed around with.

I'll post more winners as I find (or create) them. This app has really captured my interest and I am excited to keep extending it.

Alfred 2: OK, I'm In

Up until now, I've been giving Alfred a shot here or there. I would download the free version and play around with it and then run into roadblocks with its support of some things I'm currently doing with Launchbar. I have trouble overcoming the friction and eventually give up on it. It was a shame because people who didn't use Launchbar swore by Alfred. I found Launchbar seemed very well-suited to how I worked, not to mention the fact that I had already built up considerable muscle memory with Launchbar hotkeys. My interest in Alfred always persisted however and I'm glad it did.

Enter Alfred v2. It is a re-designed (from the ground up, I'm told) new version of the app and after hearing a lot of rumblings about the efficacy of the new workflow system, I thought I'd give it a go. And this was to be a real go -- one that wasn't just a dip into the common features and a surface recognition that things weren't going to work out for us, Alfred and me. No, this was going to go all the way.

So what did I find? I found a deep, useful and profoundly productive tool which has shown more promise with each day I've spent with it. At this point, Alfred has not only replaced Launchbar for common use throughout the day, but it has extended beyond it into things that Keyboard Maestro used to do. If you've ever used Keyboard Maestro, you'd know how amazing that is. That's not to say that it is perfect. It's also not to say that there are limitations as well. But it is a really, really good product (with the PowerPack installed) and I'm happy with the results so far.

I am not going to go too far down the rabbit hole in this post but I will run down some of the things that struck me about the new version of Alfred as well as some of the features that allowed it to overcome some of its previous shortcomings.

One thing that used to kill me was that I had some really fast, custom shortcuts in Launchbar -- "OL" would fire up Outlook, "PF" would fire off Pathfinder, etc. Alfred , however, picked the target apps itself and used heuristics to push things up the list of popular choices. Sometimes it picked "OL" for Outlook but if it decided that OmniOutliner made more sense, you couldn't "brute force" the choice to always choose Outlook like you could in Launchbar. I am not a huge fan of having to hit ⌘-1, etc. for additional choices so having the first choice be exactly what I want, when I want it, is key.

With workflows, that restriction is gone. I just open the workflow designer, create a trigger, map "OL" to Outlook and I'm done. The whole process takes about two minutes and it's all clicking, dragging and minimal typing.

Some cursory perusal of the Alfred forums yielded some great workflows to quickly create OmniFocus tasks, completely control Rdio, and provide a fast way to list time zones in various parts of the world. All of this functionality comes from typing a few choice keys the Alfred command box. Brilliant.

Combine that with automating some previously keyboard-intensive things I used to do like launching a terminal and typing some common commands (like "top -oCPU" etc.) or clever ways to launch framed windows to remote machines[1] and I'm saving tons of keystrokes.

I am sure my use of Alfred will change and grow over the coming weeks and, once they launch a better way to browse community workflows[2] the tool will evolve in ways people are barely able to imagine right now. At this point, I can safely say that I won't be ditching Alfred any time soon. The app looks gorgeous, has lots of options and clearly has a keen design vision behind it. I can't wait to see where this goes.

  1. Using "open vnc://MyMacMini.local" when on my home network or "open vnc://MyMacMini.{MyiCloudID}.members.btmm.icloud.com" when I want to launch a Back to My Mac session ↩

  2. It looks like they are working on it. ↩