One of the more innovative features of Notes 8 is something called conversations. In order to understand this feature, it's helpful to think about how we communicate in everyday life. If I have a conversation with someone, I'll usually end that conversation before starting a new one. This may sound obvious, but it's a contradiction to what goes on in our Inbox every day. If we look at email communications as conversations it quickly becomes clear that it differs from how we would communicate with someone if they were standing in front of us. We hold multiple conversations in our Inbox and try to follow each as they transpire. Imagine trying to have a dozen people in front of you and holding a conversation with each at eh same time. This is what we do through email every day. To make things worse, the responses are not ordered sequentially. Email is a great way to communicate with colleagues, but it is very difficult to manage because the response to our conversations are scattered throughout our Inbox.
Notes 8 makes this much easier by gathering the various conversations for us, allowing us to see the entire conversation in sequence.
This way, there is no need to hunt through your Inbox for pieces of a communication. When you couple this with preview mode, it's incredibly easy to find the content that you're looking for by quickly toggling through the messages in the conversation. Conversations doesn't stop there, however. This feature gives you visual cues that are so intuitive that you might not notice them. First, notice how the responses are indented in the picture above. The indents indicate that the message was in response to the one immediately to the left. Second, the information in the subject line is not limited to the subject itself. If all you see is "Subject" and "Re: Subject" that doesn't give you any insight into the content of the response. Instead, Notes shows you the "abstract", or the first part of the body of the message. This allows you to better understand the information contained in the response. Scanning the abstracts gets you to the email that contains the information that you're looking for, quickly.
Dwight Morse | 27 October 2007 11:21:31 PM ET | | (0)
