A Quick Observation about Mobile Apps

In 2005, no one was using apps on their mobile phones. Those were the days of the Nokia Series 40 running J2ME. Developers making J2ME apps at that time were claiming that once mobile apps took off (any minute now!), they would be best positioned to take advantage of the new market.

Along came iPhone, Android, and most importantly, all-you-can-eat data plans. But where are those J2ME developers?

If you go through the Top 10 paid or Top 10 free apps on the App Store, you'll find that the companies there are either name brands (Walt Disney, Facebook, Adobe), or smaller development firms that were started recently: For example, ngmoco, founded 6/2008, or Limbic Software, founded 2008, and so on. I couldn't find an About page or Crunchbase profile for all of the companies, but the ones I found about all matched this pattern.

Once again we learn that being early is the same as being wrong.

Do You Keep Gmail Open in Your Browser?

Everyone who uses Gmail knows this: You keep Gmail open in your browser all day so you can check your email, send off messages, and search your email archives.

Why This is Unacceptable

Yes, I believe that Gmail is the future of email (I'm a little biased).

But this is far from the optimum. Keeping Gmail and Google Calendar open in your browser should not be how we'll do email in 10 years.

Why?

1. It gets lost: Gmail being just an open tab in your browser means that it will get lost among many other tabs and browser windows that are open. As I'm writing this blog entry, I have 11 tabs open in Firefox.


2. No notifications: Unless you install separate tools, Gmail can't notify you of new important messages that come in. I'm not a fan of push email as it increases hyperactivity, but some level of notification, especially for meetings approaching in Google Calendar would be useful.


3. No integration into your workflow. Clicking mailto links doesn't work. There's no spot on your screen that says "email". There's no right-click send for documents.

Should Gmail Become Outlook?

Should the Gmail become a desktop client Outlook? No. I think that would be a step back, not forward. I imagine the ideal setup to be like Tweetie's desktop client. An icon sits in your desktop bar and gently lights up when new things arrive. (Update: Mailplane and Fluid have similar functionality, but only for the Mac).

Here's how I imagine the optimal desktop webmail experience:

1. Always on: It's not a tab you launch in your browser. It starts when your computer starts and it's on while you're working.


2. Smart notifications: Rather than showing a toast notification or playing a chime sound for each email that arrives, it would know about the relative importance of messages and infer from your behavior if it's OK to interrupt you. There's plenty of research about both importance and notifications that still needs to make it into the real world.


3. Keeps a copy of all your messages: I think reMail demonstrates how powerful it is to have all your mail on your phone. If you have your mail on your phone, why can't you have it on your desktop? Offline Gmail is headed the right way. In my ideal client, its features would become standard.

Making real progress in email clients is hard. It's easy to add new widgets, helper utilities, notifiers, and spam bots. But it's hard to move the needle on the fundamental paradigms - how do we read, check, search, and organize. Moving Gmail away from the browser into an always-on background app seems comparatively easy. The things I mentioned could probably be done by a third party - it doesn't need to be Google. Please, let's get this done.

My Wishlist for the iPhone

After a month of using the iPhone, I'm surprised about how well it's working for me. While everyone is waiting for V2, it's already pretty darn good. I have only four requests:

1. Ctrl-F in Safari: I want to be able to search inside a page that's displaying in Safari
2. Copy-paste: Emails into notes, contact info into emails, Safari into email, Safari into notes, and vice versa. (I've heard rumors this will actually be in a software update soon)
3. Emil search: Even if it only searches the last 50 received emails.
4. Headphone jack: Make it fit other headphones with thicker connectors.

I'm looking forward to a bright future where one day there might be Xobni for iPhone. A mobile application may be even more useful than the desktop one. Imagine you're on the go and can use Xobni's super-fast email search, and people profiles.

Faster chips? Or better software?

Craig Mundie, Microsoft's Chief Research and Strategy Officer in today's New York Times article "Faster Chips are Leaving Programmers in their Dust":

In the future, Mr. Mundie said, parallel software will take on tasks that make the computer increasingly act as an intelligent personal assistant.

“My machine overnight could process my in-box, analyze which ones were probably the most important, but it could go a step further,” he said. “It could interpret some of them, it could look at whether I’ve ever corresponded with these people, it could determine the semantic context, it could draft three possible replies. And when I came in in the morning, it would say, hey, I looked at these messages, these are the ones you probably care about, you probably want to do this for these guys, and just click yes and I’ll finish the appointment.”

We have the processing power to do this today, and do it on-the-fly, not overnight. What we need is better email software, not faster chips.

Processing power will clearly remain a problem for some time to come, but Mundie's example is one where the problem lies with building those "smart assistants", not adding chip horsepower.