Mailman, Mailman, Do Your Duty

I’m probably the queen of mail apps. For some reason, no matter how cool the average mail app is, I always try my best to try out all the cool mail apps. Back in the day, I even bought Sparrow…and like a month later, unfortunately, Gmail came out with its app….so I downloaded that and stopped using Sparrow (since Sparrow had no push notifications). Anyways! Back to topic. Here’s the thing. I’m obsessed with mail apps, so I figured I’d do a bit of a compare and contrast for you all.

Mailbox – Put email in its place

I downloaded this like two days ago when I got an email from Dropbox saying I’d get an extra GB of space if I synced it to my Dropbox…..that was good enough motivation for me. I’ve been running out of space so here was a perfect solution! So, Mailbox is an iPhone/iPad app that connects to Gmail. (Which brings me to limitations #1 and #2: only iOS friendly, and only Gmail)…..Regardless, it still worked for me, b/c I happen to only have gmail accounts.

The most noticeable thing about this app is the usage of swipes. They realllllly love their swiping. Essentially there are five “zones” that you can access with corresponding swipes. So, to archive a message, swipe right. To throw it away, long swipe right. To see a message later, swipe left. And to put it in a list, long swipe left. In the beginning it’ll give you a tutorial and what not.

I’m pretty sure that the goal of this app is to get people to organize their mailboxes and get it down to zero mail in your box: either by moving stuff to lists, throwing it away, or archiving messages that are no longer needed. Another feature I noticed, which I don’t even think the Gmail app by Google has is the integration of aliases. You can send emails using any of your registered Gmail aliases. The last, and probably biggest feature I noticed of this is that the attachments link to your Dropbox. (Guess that makes sense with Dropbox giving you an extra gig of storage and what not…)

Oh! And the Snooze feature (short swipe left) is nice! The number of times I’ve flagged an email and been like, oh yeah—let’s flag this. I need to come back to it in like an hr…..and then, typical Prakriti move, I totally forget about it. So the snooze would help that out a bit. Especially since they give you choices for how long to Snooze for!

See? Lots of choices.

Even though I’ve only had this for two days, I could totally see myself being a regular user, having no emails in my inbox, and just being a pro at swiping everything that comes my way.

Pros

• Perfect for swipe-crazy people
• Usage of aliases
• Will help you clear your inbox to zero mail
• Dropbox integration for attachments

Cons

• Doesn’t have integration for the new tabs Gmail added recently (Primary, Social, Promotion, Update, etc) or labels
• Only available for iOS
• Only available for Gmail

Native iOS 7 Mail App

Alrighty, next app to investigate is the iOS 7 Mail app. (Keep in mind, I’m running this on an iPhone 4, so there is a possibility that the iPhone 5, 5s, 5c might have additional features.)

They reallllly flattened the design for this. It looks stylish, but honestly, the other two apps have more functionality. Since this app wasn’t tailor-made to Gmail, you don’t have the starring, labeling, or categorizing abilities. I guess it’s kinda cool that you can flag a mail as a color or a shape? They kinda have the swipe to delete & archive thing going on too, but really. I’m not seeing anything that’s special to Mail. Oh. Shake to undo. Previously only applicable to text, now applicable to messages in case you mistakenly delete or archive it. I guess that’s exciting! (Not quite.)

I’m actually a little bummed for Apple 😦

Pro

Available for non-gmail emails

Cons

Not tailor-made to Gmail so it’s missing…..just about everything

Gmail

So the Gmail app actually by Google has that advantage over the rest is that it’s made solely for Gmail. Hence, it has pretty much all the natural functionalities of the web-based Gmail. If you’re on an Android OS, then the app has better integration with contacts and with other apps. On iOS, it’s slightly limited but not bad. So I’ve been using the Gmail app since it came out. The first version? Oh wow, it was so horrible I couldn’t delete it fast enough. But once they bought Sparrow and updated their app, I decided to give them another chance and it was much better. There’s the plus side of being able to use labels on the Gmail app. Alternatively (which just occurred to me), if you organized the Lists in a similar manner for Mailbox, that would effectively be labeling in Gmail. The search is definitely something Google boasts about, which as far as I know, they totally have the right to, given that their search is pretty amazing…

The Gmail app has the whole categories thing set, so that’s a big reason why I would use the Gmail app over Mailbox. There’s just so much clutter going into my Social, Promotions, and Updates tabs that I don’t even want to deal with it. I’m so okay with just seeing my primary mail. Plus, I like that it only gives notifications for things in my Primary tab; everything else, it just marks “2 new” or whatever on the side panel. (Unfortunately, my screenshot doesn’t reflect that because I have no unread messages as of now.)

Oh! Attachments! You can attach pics from your phone (typical) and you can also add Scribbles!

Pros

• Labeling, made by Google
• Available for Android & iOS (and Windows Phone & Blackberry!)
• Shows Primary only in the Inbox
• Scribbles!

Cons

• Design for other apps looks a little better (in my opinion)
• Works only for Gmail (not surprisingly….)

TL;DR

Mailbox

Pros: Perfect for swipe-crazy people; usage of aliases; will help you clear your inbox to zero mail; Dropbox integration for attachments

Cons: Doesn’t have integration for the new categories Gmail added recently (Primary, Social, Promotion, Update, etc) or labels; only available for iOS; only available for Gmail

Mail

Pro: Available for non-gmail emails

Cons: Not tailor-made to Gmail so it’s missing…..just about everything

Gmail

Pros: Labeling, made by Google, available for Android & iOS (and Windows Phone & Blackberry), shows Primary only in the Inbox, Scribbles!

Cons: Design for other apps looks a little better (in my opinion), works only for Gmail (not surprisingly….)

Eat, Takefilteredpictures, Love

Keep in mind, before I start….just because I couldn’t get Julia Roberts to star in my blog post doesn’t mean that this will be any less inspiring than the movie!! 🙂

So, there’s this Food app (by Evernote) that I randomly discovered like a year or two ago. It helps keep track of your meals: the food that you like and where you got it from or how you made it. And, I don’t know about you guys, but I think that all that deliciousness in one app is a brilliant idea.

Essentially there are four options on the main menu of this app: Explore Recipes, My Cookbook, Restaurants, and My Meals. Most are pretty self-explanatory, but I’ll go ahead and run through each one.

Explore Recipes

This tab pretty much populates a list of random recipes (with pictures!! …because we all know pictures make you hungrier than words) so you can browse through and see what you like. These recipes are coming from all over the Internet, top recipes from food bloggers and publishers everywhere. I mean, come on, guys. Food isn’t something to joke around about. So with a serious (and by serious, I mean, seriously hungry) attitude, swipe your way through recipes and pics and see what you like. If you click on the recipes, the recipe will open up (as expected). However, on the top right, you can see a little scissor icon. That‘s the cooler part. Clicking that button will save the recipe to your Evernote account and add it to your Cookbook. You can choose what notebook it goes in, what tags it has so you can find it more easily later, and add your own personal notes to it. Oh, and if you slide down just a bit, there’s a search bar so you can narrow down your realm of food.

Which is the perfect transition to…

My Cookbook

My Cookbook is where all those recipes you clipped in the previous section while you were getting mouth-wateringly super hungry? Yeah. They were all saved here. So now you can just browse through your cookbook and not have to go through all the miscellaneous recipes that just weren’t cutting it for you. You can also directly add your own recipes here if you want through Evernote. (Create a note with the recipe and put it in the Food notebook and it’ll auto-add it to the Food app, under My Cookbook.)

And, on the days that you don’t feel like cooking, you have…

Restaurants

Yeah, sure. I know it’s not impressive that it lists the closest restaurants to you…but you know what is pretty sweet? It has all the information for the restaurant that you may need to refer to: like a website, phone number, see the menu, and even make a reservation using OpenTable. Not to mention ratings for each place, powered by FourSquare. Even though they’re just displaying information sourced from other places, I think it’s super convenient that they’ve accumulated it all into one app. And the scissor function exists here too, so you can save the restaurant to your Evernote, making it also accessible under the Saved sub-tab. And the last sub-tab is My Meals. So any meal that’s saved that has a restaurant location will show up here, organized by the restaurant. That was you can take pictures of your good-looking food, save it, remember what you ordered and what it tasted like, and know what to or what not to get next time you go there!

 

But that’s just for the restaurant meals, for all the rest there’s…

My Meals

My Meals is honestly just a place to record your meals. I’ve heard soooo many people complaining about so many people uselessly Instagram their meals. Well, here’s a chance to give your meal a photo shoot without alerting the entire world by posting it on Facebook and Twitter (although, you do have that option in Settings).

I think my favorite part of adding a meal when I first got this app was when it autofilled what meal it was based on the time. I don’t even know why I thought that was so cool…but it so totally was!

Anyways, so when you add a meal, you can add where it was, what cuisine it was, add tags so you can search for it later, any notes (maybe on what you’d change next time, anything!). Then you can add an entire album of pictures! I got the photography gene from my dad, so one lowly photo of food doesn’t quite satisfy me.

And, I guess since the My Meals part was probably the primary feature of this app, they have a plus sign on the main menu to quickly add a meal directly from the main screen.

Essentially, at the end of the day (or rather the end of this post), I’ve concluded that this app is cooler than I thought it would be. Even though I’ve had this app for probably over a year, I think I just discovered half of its features while writing this post 🙂 I was personally mesmerized by the My Meals. (I think I may need to reconsider my standards for coolness.) However, for now, go download this app and play around with it! It’s available for iPhones and Android, so NO EXCUSES…..unless you have a Windows Phone,Blackberry, or non-smart phone. Windows Phone is even acceptable, but if you have a Blackberry or non-smart phone, ummmm, I would like to welcome you to 2013 and highly suggest you connect to the clouds. ❤ Just let me know, I’ll hook you up.