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Comment by ezy | Hacker News Reader

This person needs to try outlook. You see, there's a little flag you can click on next to the email with a task priority. And a todo bar/list which shows them in priority order. Not only has it existed before, but it really doesn't help that much. You still need to apply yourself to use it correctly. This doesn't change that.

Sigh... but then I knew I was in for wheel re-invention as soon as I saw the "modern creative workflow" sales bullshit. Perhaps there's something to be gained by making it prettier than outlook, I dunno. I feel like Alan Kay -- read about your history folks. If you're going to "re-invent email" you might want to, I don't know -- try out many different existing email clients?

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Thank you. Outlook 2007 and 2010 have a) flags, b) user-taggable-color-coded categories, c) an extremely usable ToDo bar, and d) Xobni and a million other plugins that attempt to prioritize your incoming mail automatically.

I'm not saying Outlook works for me (it doesn't), but it's annoying that the author pretended Outlook doesn't exist, and essentially proposed his version of Outlook as a solution to the "problem".

To be fair, as far as I can tell this is only a concept by a UI designer, created as a portfolio piece. I believe the its purpose isn't to reinvent email as much as it is to show off his knowledge of graphic design and CSS transforms.

I had a serious crack at using Outlook for this a few years ago and I found it woefully inadequate. Outlook tasks are either todo or done. There's no way of monitoring "waiting on Alice for confirmation", "waiting for Bob's approval of the finished work". Related to this, the task list seems to only display one-dimensionally, e.g. I couldn't put together a useful list of my more important tasks that were due later this week alongside my less-important tasks due today. Also, tasks are effectively a pointer to an email. There's no way of tying together disparate emails into a single task. Lastly, I found myself wanting to really use tasks as a something like "tag annotations" - I'd be having 2 or 3 conversations about optimization in the team and want to note them all together along with a high-level view of things to do before and after.

I quite like Outlook and would love its task system to be more useful, enough so that I've thought of putting work into it to make it what I want. The fact is, though, that it doesn't really do most of what the author of the article wants, and it definitely isn't suitable as anything more than building blocks for a workflow system.

I've also tried outlooks tasks and while it's good as one-off reminders it doesn't solve the big problem with email, and neither will this mockup that doesn't even propose anything else than the action-lists.

The problem with email is that all information you need is everywhere! It's a matter of discipline. Labels only solve half the issue. To start with we've got improper headlines, emails with information about many, totally unrelated tasks, replies to old messages in same conversation - this breaks threading in every email client i've tried, especially if many different senders jump in and out of the conversation.

Gmail can have several star colors and labels, too. So I guess you could replicate his workflow there as well.

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