I’ve always seen the inbox area of Woosabi as being key to the product and key to where the product will be driven. This is probably because I’m an engineer and communicate with my clients almost 100% through email - we do face to face meets too which are vital but once we’re working email is the main link really.

Which means my user experience of Woosabi is focused almost totally around the inbox (using jobs and invoices to make sure i get paid ) . Where Woosabi already has a leg up  on solving the ‘overloaded inbox’ problem, is that email (in the Woosabi world) is either connected to a contact or it isn’t (in which case it’s a new contact and Woosabi will ask to create an association or do something with it spamwise).

 What this boils down to is with Woosabi that your inbox is usually only a 10 or 20 messages deep, and messages are either marked with reminders to reply (important) or not (not important) - sounds simplistic? It is and it works really well!

 At the moment I believe Woosabi email is at least as good as the current webmail offerings (gmail, hotmail, etc) but our architecture means we can do so much more and in particular aggresively attack the problem of spam, volume and response times to email.

The problems and perceptions of which are neatly summed up in this techCruch post

2,433 Unread Emails Is An Opportunity For An Entrepreneur 

Attributed to Microsoft, more likely to have come via Xerox PARC, ‘dogfooding’ is the process where the developers of a product actually use it on a daily basis with the expressed intention of a) working out if it’s fit for purpose and b) rubbing the developer’s nose in it if it stinks.

So, I’ve been “eating our dogfood” since Friday and whilst it’s no finely seared Foie gras on a bed of mandarines and espresso foam (which the nearby Le Gallois resturant does www.legallois-ycymro.com) it’s definately a really satisfying steak frites; which let’s face it, is what you always really want isn’t (unless you’re a veggie and I assure you the frites are pretty good on their own.)

Okay enough of the tortuous metaphors, this is what I’ve been doing today with Woosabi:

1. Logged in to find Woosabi reminding me that I’ve not yet sent the invoices that it generated for me yesterday - automatic monthly fixed fee clients
2. Printed off the invoices - complete with customizable logo etc
3. Printed off the addressed envelopes (automatically provided for you!)
4. Watched all my invoices switch from unsent to sent
5. Woosabi’s now happy that I’ve sent them so it’s not warning me anymore (it will when they go unpaid for too long though)
6. I’ve gotten my invoices out early and with zero effort on my part. I’m happy

So that’s the past few days of using Woosabi for my todo list, my email and my invoices. Is it any good?

Did I mention that I’ve stopped using Microsoft Word and Mozilla Thunderbird

Wouldn’t it be nice if someone reminded you that it’s been a while since you got in touch with the ones you care about.

And then helped you send them a text message or email or letter.

And then sent it for you.

Welcome to Woosabi.

No prize for spotting the deliberate speeling mistake!

Full size movie Click here

Wouldn’t it be nice if someone reminded you:

When you’ve got new mail

When you’ve got mail that you’ve not responded to, ones that you’ve told them to remind you about!

Welcome to Woosabi.

Full size movie here

 Wouldn’t it be nice if you could filter your email inbox by just typing a word or two, which searches…

the email message,

the sender,

the subject,

the attachments…

All at the same time?

Welcome to Woosabi!

Full size movie here

This afternoon’s development update brings you a nice little movie so grab a drink and see Woosabi:Email in action.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could…

See and fetch attachments without having to click into an email

Automatically link your email to your contacts

Automatically update your contacts ‘activity’ details when you receive email

Welcome to Woosabi.

Full size movie here

You might recall that last Friday our inbox looked like this:

Well, it now looks like this:

It’s still got a few interface tweaks to iron out some differences between it and the ultra smart StyleGuide version - or else Eds will be round 8}

So, we’re 4 weeks away from the launch of Woosabi and the integrated email needs some serious attention. It turns out that the Thunderbird email client sends all attachments as inline messages by default. This means, basically, that emails sent via Thunderbird were showing up without their attachments (they are still there) or the message was showing part of an attachment instead of the actual message.

This is a serious problem for Woosabi, as we do lots of very smart things with email, in fact our integrated email (imail?) removes a lot of the unecessary clunk of using email - for example, it automatically connects your mail to your contacts which connect to your job list which connect to your files. What does that mean in English?

• It means that Woosabi can let you download any attachment to any email from any computer just by typing a contact name.
• It means Woosabi will remind you that you’ve not responded to an important email after a few days of reading it.
• It means Woosabi can send you a text message to let you know that a particular contact has replied to an urgent message
• It means Woosabi takes care of things for you!

Unfortunately, for me, it means a few late nights trying to fix Thunderbirds rather strange way of doing things. So, when in doubt, go back to basics, find out where the discrepency lies and then build back up from there.

It’s Friday night, everyone else is off down the pub, but I’ll have a beer when we launch and know it was worth it

So here it is, the current Inbox - stay tuned for updates!