[START OF AUDIO] Steve Dotto here. I�m glad you�re spending
time with me today. We are going to continue our lifelong pursuit of the perfect email
solution today with a look at Dispatch, a brand new iOS email client. Now Dispatch follows
hard on the heels of variety of these sorts of apps being launched over the last little
while. We recently did a video on Mailbox, which has been bought by Dropbox, an excellent
solution. You can watch our video on that. I still like that app a lot. It was the first
app that I used that really gave me control of over what we�re starting to call email
triage. As we use email more and more on our smartphones,
we�re starting to realize that the phone is not necessarily the best place to respond
to long emails but instead it�s a great place to sort your email prior to actually
writing and doing a lot of heavy lifting in the email. So you can sort and organize your
email while you�re on your phone when you have a few minutes down so that when you sit
down at your computer, a lot of the presorting is done.
Now Dropbox does that by putting it into different folders for us and creating kind of action
items and a priority list out of your email. It does a great job of that. But where it
falls short is in actually editing the email and when you�re actually editing and sending
the email. It doesn�t do a great job in that area. Dispatch does a lot better job
in that area. Now having said that, I don�t myself spend
a lot of time writing long emails on my phone. In fact, I write very little. I usually dictate
anything into my phone but you�ll see the tools in Dispatch really kind of have raised
the bar as far as what we can do on this tiny little screen we have on our phone. Let me
show you the app itself. Let�s jump onto my iPhone here and have a look.
Here�s Dispatch here and when we launch Dispatch, when we look into in my main email
inbox we see that if I swipe to the left, it�s very similar to how Dropbox and how
most of the other kind of email triage clients work. It allows me to then bring up in this
case here a pop-up menu that allows me to store the email, file it away, mark it as
spam, or trash it so kind of quick actions at that point. It will also allow me, if I
swipe all the way to the left, to archive it right away, which is the best way to kind
of sort through things really quickly. It does pretty good job here of this level of
managing your email although in my opinion not quite as good a job does Mailbox does.
Where this app really shines is when we open up that email, take a look at it, and start
to deal with the email itself. Let me show what we can do with the email within the editing
interface. The first thing we can do is highlight any piece of text and we can copy it. So it
allows us to select the text. We can copy it of course but we can also create a quote
out of just a small little part of the text or the whole text, which allows us to quote
it into the email that we�re replying, very useful as far as creating context in communication.
But do you see that tool right next to it, New Snippet? That�s where this app really
gets exciting. It allows me to create a snippet, which is basically the same sort of little
text string as we use in Text Expander. Text Expander is a great utility that I use on
my Mac. We did a video on it just recently. Check it out. It�s basically a keyboard
macro tool that you can use to enter just a quick little character string which will
then paste in a large chunk of text. I also use it to correct the common typos that I
make on an ongoing basis. For me, it�s been an absolute lifesaver. There�s a sister
product in Windows so you people that use a Windows PC, never fear. You are also covered.
This actually uses the same snippets. You can import them back and forth from Text Expander
into Dispatch, which I find really, really exciting.
So once you�ve done that, if you�ve copied it or created a snippet, then you create your
reply and they make it easy for you. They look at who wrote to you and they create a
salutation right away so you don�t have to type in �Hi Lorraine� in this particular
case. It�s already done that for me. So I�m going to leave this salutation in and
I can start to write. Of course I can do my dictation. �I�m glad that you wrote to
me because I�m very interested in this product.� So I can do that, my voice dictation stuff
which all works great. But look down here at the bottom of this screen.
If I just tap on that, it then pops up this little Show Snippets tool, which allows me
to load in any snippets, to automatically paste in any snippet that I've already created.
So if I've created the snippet that says, �I�ll be there in five minutes� or �I�m
on my phone. I really don�t have time to respond to this email but I will shortly,�
it allows me to do those sorts of things very quickly and very effectively, and send the
email. Now as good at that is, and that is very good,
it�s not what made me decide to use this particular piece of software. Let me show
you what really enamored me to this software. If we look at the very bottom of the screen
here in the email reading window, we�ve got some of the same tools for moving forward
and back, archiving and marking email but to the far right we have what we can do with
it: send this email to; make a reminder�that's a great tool; send it to things, that�s
great especially if you use things; create an Asana task from it, that one there just
warmed my heart. I use Asana all the time. It�s my favorite team manager and task manager.
So I can create a task directly out of my email. So often emails relate directly to
tasks so the ability to create a task directly from it is a massive productivity tool.
Then this one nearly brought tears to my eyes. I can send it to Evernote, and not just send
it to Evernote as an email into the Evernote inbox. No, it actually opens Evernote, launches
it, and allows me to go in and apply tags and the other meta information that I like
to add to all of my notes, that allows me to then wield control over my Evernote notebook.
This tool, Dispatch, has risen really kind of to the top of the list of useful iOS mail
apps as far as I�m concerned. There are other good contenders to be sure but to me,
Dispatch is well worth a few dollars that you�re going to have to spend on it, especially
because of this Evernote integration. To me, that is just brilliant, absolutely brilliant.
I hope you found this video useful. We certainly appreciate you taking the time to view them.
I�m Steve Dotto and we�ll see you again soon.
[END OF AUDIO] Steve Dotto0Dispatch iOS0June 16, 2013
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