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Inbox2 does email + social networks in style, but not for everyone
Inbox2 is a "premium connected lifestyle application". I'm not making that phrase up -- it's from their about page. In simpler terms, it's an email client which also does Facebook and Twitter. And it's beautiful. Seriously -- this thing is in-your-face gorgeous. I love the color scheme!
Since the premise is fairly easy to understand, I'd like to share a short list of pros and cons from my testing tonight.
The good stuff:
- It's beautiful. Looks matter, and this thing is gorgeous. I know I said it -- it bears repeating.
- It has some neat productivity features built in, such as a "waiting for reply" label which is really important.
- Syncs up with just about every service under the sun. GMail (and any POP/IMAP mail server), Facebook, Twitter, Yammer... Check out the screenshot in the gallery to see what I mean.
- It's easy to switch accounts off and on when you want to focus on what matters.
- Wow, what memory hog. Why can't apps look good and not take up 265MB of RAM?
- It spammed my entire Facebook contact list on installation! What is up with that? It just sent out a status update on my behalf! Frankly, that is enough for me to uninstall the whole thing. Really intrusive, imho.
- No RTL (right-to-left, Hebrew/Arabic) support for composing messages. I know most of you don't care about this one, but I do. :) It does display RTL messages properly, as you can see in the screenshot.
- There's no simple conversation view, a-la Gmail. I got so used to the GMail "conversation" paradigm, that seeing separate messages in my inbox was suddenly a bit confusing. It does have a "thread" view, but each thread takes up a lot of vertical space in the list.
A few more screenshots after the jump.
Enthusiastically spamming my Facebook contacts without asking:
Support for tons of services:
Simple (and sparse) options dialog:
Comments
11
Subscribe to commentsblogwardFeb 24th 2010 5:32PM
There is an option NOT to invite facebook friends, but the implementation of Facebook is really lame - it just opens its own browser window. As you say - nice looking, but doesn't really deliver and hogs RAM.
kevinFeb 24th 2010 5:30PM
Is does? Really?
g389556Feb 24th 2010 7:12PM
It spammed my entire Facebook contact list on installation!
PRIVACY PRIVACY PRIVACY PRIVACY PRIVACY PRIVACY PRIVACY
Me thinks it would be CRAZY to use this. What the he-- we're they thinking about.!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
szymonFeb 25th 2010 4:22AM
Hi,
There is an option (tick-box) NOT to invite friends.... so spam is sorted :)
However - it does not support facebook fan pages - big disadvantage for me ;/
Regards,
Szymon
Sam JordanFeb 24th 2010 6:01PM
I tried this, nice *idea* but the implementation is a bit off. Threaded messages are simply a must for email, especially as I have a few emailers with multiple authors and hundreds of messages and like the author said, memory hog.
Maybe in a couple versions time this could be something cool.
waseemFeb 24th 2010 6:11PM
Hi Erez,
Thanks for the article. When you configure your Facebook account there is a checkbox that you can tick off if you don't want the client to announce. Apologies if we didn't make it clear enough.
Inbox2 does threading tho, if you don't like the stream view (which also shows inline attachments and image previews) you can always hop to what we call the single-line view, here is a screenshot of what it looks like: http://bit.ly/9l7o2Z
Regarding the memory issue, that is being looked into. Have you tried a restart? Our goal is to have Inbox2 hover around 80-120 megs of memory (which should be a breeze for any modern computer :-))
Take care,
Waseem
blasztaFeb 24th 2010 9:47PM
- Yup, your check box doesn't clear enough! Please put a link like "What is this?" and when the user roll over there's an explanation like "it will spam your social networks friends, thx!"
- The problem is your threading doesn't work like Gmail. Occasionally it also breaks a threaded conversation without any reason.
- For memory, you should try lower than 80 MB (Outlook use only 33 MB in my laptop)
Anyway, it looks nice for a beta product. I might give a try again after it leave beta stage.
Erez ZukermanFeb 25th 2010 2:09AM
Waseem,
Thanks for your reply!
1) With regards to the checkbox: It should basically be opt-in rather than opt-out. IMHO, of course. Most people don't notice and just next-next-next through the install, and this sort of thing leaves a bad taste.
2) I looked at the screenshot to understand threading, but I'm afraid it's a bit too small for me. Could not quite figure it out - sorry.
3) 80-120MB sounds reasonable indeed. I would be happy to provide specific debug information if your support guys need it.
Good luck on your efforts -- I can definitely see the potential. Thanks again fro writing.
Ben!Feb 24th 2010 11:57PM
I just knew (knew knew knew) that the comments would consist of people bitching about privacy because they didn't read the screen before clicking "next." It's right there. It's clear as day. You didn't uncheck the box. It's your fault.
@davey_ladFeb 25th 2010 4:10AM
All of the above.
... except the bit were Ben says is our fault for not unchecking the box.... should be opt-in, end of!
Unfortunately, first impressions last... i doubt i'd go back to see if things improve over the coming months/year... do we really need another email client (that happens to have a few bells and whistles) ? This isn't really anything special... although it may re-ignite my interest when they get the mobile sync option up and running. If it can replace Nokia Messaging then I'd be happy
*uninstalled*
Ben!Feb 25th 2010 11:42AM
Yeah, you're right -- it's completely unimportant for a user to actually read the screen before clicking "next." It's not that you're a moron for not opting out. Not at all.