The Least Worst Option
…is email itself
I’ve spent the past few hours researching ways to make email a little simpler to use and come to the conclusion what I’m actually after is a mix of task management and chat.
Email is 50 years old. It was designed for a simpler time, when computers were bigger, slower, and bulkier. Email was designed in a time where there were no user interfaces, and all you got was text on a screen. Windows was 20 years in the future. Macs came out 15 years after email.
Email is ubiquitous now, and it hasn’t improved. It’s the same header, text metadata mix.
But the world now has chat applications of all shapes and sizes. The formatting is far simpler — one sender, one recipient; endless scroll of messages; sender on left, your replies on right; latest messages at the bottom.
Slack, Google Hangouts, Microsoft Messenger, Facebook Messenger, Twitter and what have you all use this arrangement. It’s simple and recognizable.
But the problem they have is they’re all “membership” models. And they don’t play with anyone else. Slack messages stay in Slack. Twitter stays on Twitter. And don’t get me started on Facebook, the parasites.
Even secure apps like Signal suffer from the problem: Yes it’ll stand in for SMS on your phone, but it won’t let anyone talk to you unless they’re a member of its ecosystem.
This is the one and only strength of email. Yes, it’s clunky, and the apps are all pretty much identical (save for the rather interesting Touchmail, which repackages messages in a pleasing manner). Yes, it’s the very same format built 50 years ago.
But you can send an email to anyone. You don’t have to join their app, sacrifice your soul or hand over your entire existence to “The Zuck”. Slack might want to kill email, but it won’t do it so long as it’s a membership model.
So as much as I hate email, is The Least Worst option of basically every other communication system on the planet. Yes it’s messy. Yes, it’s antiquated technology. Yes the applications are all crap.
But at least it works.
Non-standard email apps
These are okay, but have limitations
