Our Favorite Mail, Calendar, and Reminders Alternatives – TMO Daily Observations 2017-07-20
Jeff Butts and Kelly Guimont join Jeff Gamet to share their favorite iPhone, iPad, and Mac third party app alternatives for Apple’s Mail, Calendar, and Reminders apps.
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Show Notes
- Favorite alternatives for Apple's Mail, Calendar, and Reminders apps
- Newton
- MailMate
- Spark
- Canary Mail
- Fantastical
- OmniFocus
- Due
- TMO Daily Observations Twitter feed
I have an application on my Mac and iPad and iPhone that I love using to replace both Calendar and Reminders, and to do lists: Informant 5. Really well integrated, syncs very well, amazing variety of ways to view your data, filter it, etc. So far, though, it lacks the natural language input. So I also keep Fantastical running and use its ability to parse natural language when I am setting up new events and tasks.
This was a great episode–I love hearing about the various apps people use for their productivity. For me, I use the following:
For mail: I actually stick with Google Inbox (in Chrome, on the Mac), and the iOS app on iPhone and iPad. My primary email is a gmail address, and Inbox lets me customize how frequently I see each type of message, so that I’m not bombarded with notifications all day long. However, email isn’t a major part of my personal workflow. For work email, I’m largely stuck with Outlook because I need compatibility with other users in my office.
Personally, for the reminders app, I stick with Apple reminders largely because I can maintain synchronization between my iPhone, iPad, my work Mac and my home Mac. However, I’ve recently added a SetApp subscription, where I discovered Lacona… this lets me hit Alt+Space and just type a reminder, like, “remind me to pick up cat food at 7pm” which is exactly the same thing I’d say to Siri when I’m using CarPlay on my commute home. For me, that immediate voice control is the main thing that keeps me tied to Reminders. However, another SetApp benefit is the app GoodTask, which provides a dark mode (yay!) UI that wraps reminders, but has a little more detail on each task, so that color coding and prioritization keep the tasks grouped a little better.
And with calendar, I just can’t swallow the $70 CAD price tag for Fantastical, so I stick with Google Calendar (because I share my calendars with my wife and kids), and I only use Apple Calendar to allow me to merge both my Google Calendar and my work Exchange Calendar in a single app so that I can plan my week better.
It will be interesting to hear about the browser issue as well, but it would be really awesome if you would cover Office suites as well. Do most Mac users stick with Pages/Numbers/Keynote, or does MS Office, LibreOffice, OpenOffice, Office 365, or Google Docs come into play for anyone?