New software! One of my guilty pleasures is trying out new software. Guilty!? Yes, although only a little bit. I mean that figuratively. The figurative "guilt" comes from knowing that I don't actually need to swap out tools. My tools are fine, and the likelihood that a new tool is 10x better approaches zero. Anyhow, I _really like_ trying out new tools. I _love_ iterating on my workflow. As long as the computer can't connect directly to my brain there is room for improvement, so I really like trying new software. Maybe its a vice, maybe it will turn out to be a strength when i become internet-famous for my long-winded tech reviews on new products. Who knows! > [!NOTE] The hype is real > I'm also surprisingly hyped as I write this. Maybe it's the first coffee of the day, or maybe it's just that I tend to be super energetic from around 11am until some time in the afternoon. Regardless, I'm pretty stoked to be writing a blog post about some random software. Let's go! 🔥 # Email **Status quo:** Superhuman I use Superhuman for email because it's the most keyboard-friendly, focused on efficiency option out there. I would like to replace it with something cheaper though. It's not that Superhuman costs "too much", it's that I'm essentially paying $30/mo for better keyboard shortcuts. I don't make use of their team features, which seem quite useful. I also (thankfully) don't have enough email volume to add up to huge time savings when clearing out my inbox. Gripes: - They think "AI" is useful in the context of email - Expensive That being said, Superhuman actually convinced me of certain UI features I had previously disliked. Two things in particular: - Unified inbox is not desirable. I used to want this, but it turns out that it's a bad idea. It's more important to easily know what email you're using to respond as you peruse your mail. It's also very easy to switch. Furthermore, one of your inboxes is bound to be loaded with crap while the others are relatively clean. For me, my personal email which i've had for over a decade is loaded with crap. Thankfully it doesn't have to polute a unified inbox. - Displaying the list of messages and the message body at once. This is how Apple Mail does it, but it's not a great experience in my opinion. When you read an email you want to focus on it, then you take some action on it and move on. Having a list for your inbox and then a single view for your currently open mail is preferable. Onward to the competition. ## Contender: Mimestream It's an email client... I find there's not much to differentiate most of these. This is something Superhuman got right by proclaiming very loudly that its whole purpose for existence was to save you time, by being fast in a technical sense and also fast to accomplish your email tasks. Anyhow, in my testing so far Mmestream is also fast in a technical sense. Not yet sure if it's fast enough in terms of accomplishing common email tasks, like responding to intros. **What's to like**: - Cheap. At 5/mo that's 1/6th the price of Superhuman - Focused. It only works with Gmail and only runs on macOS. - I consider this a feature because focus is important in software. I imagine this is not a large company, so they have to pick their battles. Integrating with the Outlook API or deploying to Windows are likely battles not worth fighting. - Fast. Even faster, in a technical performance sense, than Superhuman it seems. Possibly because its a native app. - Keyboard shortcuts work. j/k goes up and down as you'd expect (if you're one of the dozens of Vim users out there). Will i make the switch? Quite possibly. I'll at least try it as my primary email client once my current Superhuman subscription lapses. # Calendar **Status quo:** Built-in Calendar app for macos. The Calendar app is fine, even "good" if you like using the mouse. But I don't. I also subjectively don't like the app that much. Gripes: - It doesn't have an "upcoming" view of all your events regardless of date. This is easy enough to work around, since Raycast has this feature, but it's not ideal. - Not keyboard focused. ## Contender: Notion Calendar I had no idea Notion made a calendar product. They don't exactly make it, they acquired it. It used to be Cron (cron.com). What's to like: It has a command palette. That's about it so far. I tried creating an event and it didn't seem to have the fuzzy creation syntax i've come to expect. i.e. "lunch with bob at noon tomorrow" should, at the very least, be able to resolve to an event with: - title: lunch with bob - when: noon tomorrow, based on the current date in my locale I haven't yet found this with Cron which is surprising because it feels like such a table stakes feature for a calendar these days. It's also unclear to me how this makes notion better. Clearly they think it does, but why? I suppose if you're using notion for project management and tracking it might be useful to have a calendar of your development pipeline... maybe? I've never desired this from Linear and i've used it on teams with thousands of tickets (Mostly complete or pending, of course, not all in progress). # Linear for X I really like Linear. It is one of relatively few software companies I am emotionally involved with. Once Linear finally makes documents a first class citizen in their app maybe they can fully take over the digital world. One can hope. The tools i've looked at here all slightly fit the bill of "Linear for X" in that they have a focus on ergonomics and keybaord use. Computing at the speed of thought is the goal we have not yet reached, but all these software try to move in that direction.