Another day, another email app -- but then another day, another ton of emails, too. As much as we like email, it gets on top of you, and your job isn't Executive in Charge of Replying to Everything, so any tool that can help manage messages is worth serious attention.
Preside 1.0 for iOS is a new app that aims to speed up how you deal with incoming email.
So it has filing suggestions, and its got a fast way of selecting a lot of mail and just dragging it to folders. Where other rivals to Apple Mail have confusingly only taken the inbox and maybe sent items, Preside brings in all your iCloud folders. We're now embarrassed how many we have, but they are all in Preside, and therefore all on our iPhone and iPads.
We're embarrassed, though, because we're productivity nuts, and believe with some evidence that only having a couple or three mailbox folders is the way to go. Somehow we've accumulated over 40. That doesn't mean we're using them, we think about 35 must be from before we saw the light, but still we have a lot of folders -- and Preside encourages this. You can file an email message into any folder you have, and with about the same number of taps, you can file it to any folder on any service from iCloud to Microsoft Exchange.
There's a predictive algorithm that makes Preside reckon in advance where you're likely to file a particular message, and it helps you get there faster but still, you're navigating a lot. So we question how much use too much filing is, but we can still like how the app does it. Only, the makers claim that Preside's system will save you one minute per email you file, and that's just not possible. It's not conceivable: it would mean that right now, it takes you at least 61 seconds to move one email message into one folder. Unless you're printing it out to take to a filing cabinet in the office down the hall, doing it in slow motion and stopping for a coffee break on the way back, that isn't happening.
We like the features and the facilities, we like the speed of the app, but it is one of those where you need to think in the same way as the developer. So for instance, it is certain to be clear to them that your mailboxes are sorted in the order they are, but to us it was perplexing trying to find the Inbox.
It's not the best-looking app: from its icon to the default main screen, it's busy, and feels technical. The makers would doubtlessly have you know that you can adjust the layout to your heart's content, but you won't. Adjusting is fine for making small changes if you don't happen to like one particular thing. When it's more than that, when you would have the window layout, the borders, the font choices and the colors be different, then that's a job. We'd say it's the makers' job.
So we'd also say that the developers are not especially focused on the visual side of email, and are instead deeply interested in the technicalities. That's not in the sense of iOS Swift programming, it's in the sense of people having to deal with a lot of email, and to deal with it in many ways. Really, the makers of Preside are focused on power features, and they've done these well.
Chief amongst the ones we wish Apple would take on board is how Preside works with To Do apps. You can tap to select an email, and then tap the Reminders icon to get a menu of various To Do software. There's a total of 16 available and, nicely, Preside displays first the ones you've got. If you go into the More option, you get a list of all that it can support, plus a Download button that takes you to the App Store.
It isn't bulletproof. If you happen to have a task open in OmniFocus, for instance, then when you use Preside to send a new task to the app, it doesn't happen. You are switched back to OmniFocus, but no new task is entered. Similarly, you can select many email messages and tap to send them to OmniFocus, but only one will go.
You also can't highlight a segment of an email and pass that directly into OmniFocus, or the rest, but you can select something and tap a Share button to use the iOS 9 Share Extension if your To Do app has it. Preside's ability to send the entire mail message into the To Do app is much better, though, as if the app supports it, then it can give iOS a feature that OS X has long had. If you send an email from Mail to OmniFocus, then within the To Do app when you see that task, you have a button to take you back to Mail and the original thread.
It is little touches like this that do make Preside appealing, but while we're sorry to keep coming back to the design, it is an issue. Maybe only for us, but the look of something affects the use of it: we find it harder to spot and read email subject headings in this than we do in Apple Mail.
Preside is a new app, but it claims to require only iOS 5.1.1 or later. Sharing options have to need more, as some of the lean on iOS 9 features, though. Preside 1.0
is free in the App Store, with an optional in-app purchase. There are two of these; both are to do with giving you the same premium features, but one is $4 for a month, and the other is $19 for a year. You don't get a giant amount more use or features out of the app for subscribing like this, but the makers are quite upfront: "the main reason to purchase Preside Premium is to keep the app from breaking."
Who is Preside 1.0 for:
You need to be finding email a problem, just from the volume of it, and you need to be quite technically-minded both to appreciate how Preside works, and to be more interested in the function than the appearance.
Who is Preside 1.0 not for:
There are sleeker rivals to Mail, such as
Airmail, but there are also ways to use Apple Mail one better.
-- William Gallagher (
@WGallagher)
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