Mail in iOS 16, iPhone 14 and iOS 16 Reviews, and More

September 16, 2022

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A First Look at Mail in iOS 16 »

Remember the golden age of email apps? I remember Sparrow, the best email client to ever be made. I remember the wait line to get into Mailbox. I even remember the seemingly endless wait to get the new Outlook design just a few years ago.

Those were the good ol’ days.

It’s not like there’s a shortage of email apps in the App Store though. Spark continues to be an excellent pick for all email users. Options like Edison, Proton Mail, Hey, Canary Mail, and more are all available, with strong feature sets and reasonable pricing.

None of these click for me, unfortunately. This will certainly be a “It’s not you, it’s me” problem, but I don’t find any of these email apps particularly inspiring or delightful. My colleagues love Spark. I just don’t jive with it.

And when things don’t jive in third-party territory, then you rely on Apple to create a reasonably good first-party app to hold you over until the next hot new email app hits the App Store.

Mail is a pretty good email app in iOS 15 — good, but not great. It’s free. It services most, if not all, the email services. It has reasonably good design and is baked into iOS 15.

Mail is also slow, lacks certain table stakes features like Undo Send, Send Later, and has a clinical design that lacks any sort of whimsy.

iOS 16 promises more than a few fixes — especially to these table stakes features. For anyone holding out for the ultimate email app for iOS, the latest out of Cupertino may end up checking more boxes than any third-party option available.

Mouseposé: A Handy Little Utility for Better Live Software Demos »

Earlier this year, I attended the Macstock Conference & Expo where I saw Mike Rose share about a few tools to give better live software demos. One of the apps he mentioned was an app called Mouseposé, a simple macOS utility by Boinx software that I had somehow never come across before.

Essentially, what Mouseposé does is help you focus your audience’s attention on what you’re doing by highlighting your mouse cursor as you share your screen. It does this by adding macOS accessibility features that enable you to give live software demos that look a lot like polished screencasts or course videos you might find here at The Sweet Setup. You can highlight your mouse position, show mouse clicks with simple animations, and even have a ribbon display at the bottom of your screen that shows keystrokes for things like keyboard shortcuts.

Simple Mindfulness Meditation with Center »

I recently re-read (listened?) the Audible Original How To Train Your Mind by Chris Bailey about the productivity benefits of mindfulness meditation. The short version is that you gain back an average of 7 minutes for each minute you spend meditating. This obviously only works up until a certain point, but this statistic has rekindled my motivation to make mindfulness meditation a regular practice again.

One thing that struck me about this “book” is that the type of mindfulness meditation Chris champions is simply focusing on your breath. While I still think Headspace is a great option for most folks who want guided meditations, I recently embarked on an App Store quest to find a simple meditation app 1) without a guide that 2) has a clean UI and 3) integrates with Apple Health.

What I landed on was Center Meditation Timer by Tanner Christensen.

Is your productivity busted?

If you feel like you could use a tuneup for how you manage your tasks and your time, get access to our Productivity Workshop.

Shawn Blanc (founder of The Sweet Setup) covers:

1. The four most common symptoms of a busted productivity workflow
2. What you can do to overcome them
3. How to improve your approach to managing and organizing your tasks.

You’ll also get the downloadable templates and cheatsheets.

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Is your productivity busted?

iOS 16 and iPhone Links From Our Friends »