It’s remarkable to think how little email, the basis of digital communication, has changed, given how much the rest of the digital world around it has. These days, there are apps that accomplish every task under the sun, in new and creative ways. And yet email is stuck in the online equivalent of the Dark Ages, an analog list that’s boring at best and infernally dense at worst.
Now, thankfully, there’s an app looking to rethink the email.
Whether for work, for business, or for simple communication purposes, we’re constantly connected to our accounts, which are dull, and crowded, and frustrating to use. The question we’re asking with TouchMail is ‘how can we use new normal of touch screen devices to streamline that experience?’ ‘How can we introduce intelligent and aesthetically pleasing design into something that’s so vital but has lagged so far behind the rest of tech innovation?’” says Touchmail co-founder and CEO Matthew Carlson.
Looking at Touchmail, the early reception of its Beta version at the 2013 DEMO Conference in San Francisco, and the fact that there are 3.3 billion email accounts in the world, the only thing that’s hard to understand is how no one thought of anything like this earlier.
Touchmail reduces your inbox to a wonderful and easy-to-navigate color-coded grid, according to sender, date, importance. The app was designed with the Windows 8 platform in mind, with features like a touch-screen zoom and slide and a tile-based display that really brings out the best that the operating system has to offer. But new versions are on the way, and what people will really be looking forward to is the mobile version.
As co-founder and CTO Alex Frank explains, “one of the things TouchMail has put an emphasis on is an effective use of space. On a smartphone, where the screen is much smaller than even a tablet, our technology is going to change things even more. Trying to process your typical list inbox on a smartphone is almost impossible for people getting 100 emails or more a day. And TouchMail is going to make the whole experience more manageable and more enjoyable.”
The only thing to say is, “it’s about time.”