A new Kickstarter campaign called Crono is making a bold claim: it wants to revolutionize your Inbox and make it easier, faster, and more intuitive to use. I’m sold.
Once upon a time, I was good at keeping up with email. Then I became a blogger, and a published novelist, and now I receive hundreds of emails every day. Some of them are important. Some, less so. There are gazillions of press releases, several personal inquiries, and lots of stuff that falls somewhere in between. And it’s just too much. I’m trying to hold back the flood with my finger in the dike — only the dike broke a long time ago.
At the time of this writing, there are 2,419 messages in my Inbox marked as “Unread.” Email isn’t fun anymore. It’s a time-hogging, soul-sucking chore. For the love of all that’s good and holy, something has to be done.
Crono looks like the beautiful, intelligent email app Apple should have come up with. It’s sleek, stylish, smooth, and simple. Watch the video above if you don’t believe me. Go ahead, I’ll wait. It’s part Inbox, part task manager, part social media interface. And it’s all about changing the entire email experience (which sounds like nirvana to me).
You can keep multiple user accounts in Crono, each one password-protected. Meaning you can share an iPad with your family, but no one can read your email but you. It’s got sophisticated sorting algorithms so it can figure out on its own which emails are the most relevant to you, and place them in higher-priority folders. Crono is even smart enough to observe your behaviors and learn to automate them for you. Like that mailing list you subscribe to whose messages you don’t want to delete, but you need to save them somewhere for reading later. Drag them over to the appropriate folder, and pretty soon Crono will start doing that for you as soon as the emails arrive.
You can search through your Inbox, you can turn any email into a task, and much more. It’s built with the iPad’s interface in mind, so you’ll get page turns, pinch-to-zoom, and all the niceties.
Crono is asking for just $40,000, which is a very reasonable goal for a Kickstarter campaign. Please. I beg you. My Inbox begs you. Support this campaign. Do it for my sanity. Or, you know, for the children. Or something. We have to make this thing happen, people!
5 thoughts on “Email Needs a Revolution”
Awesome. Definitely backing this one.
Another week … another promise of a evolution in email. No folks … it’s not going to happen.
One reason Mr Parrish – is because no program can help you when you leave 2,419 messages in my Inbox marked as “Unread.” No one. No software program can decide which ones are important. No software program can ensure that that one really important email, on which your career and your income depends, doesn’t get flagged as spam or lowest priority.
The way to revolutionise your email is to take responsibility and learn how to create filters, how to manage your time and how to make decisions.
Wow. You should write greeting cards.
Come on down to my house and live my life for a few days, and then tell me more about the secrets of time management. It should be easy for you, since you already know every single thing I am faced with on a daily basis, everything battling for my constant attention, every physical issue I deal with, and how hard I work from the minute I wake up in the morning until the minute I go to bed at night, in order to provide for my family. Sounds like you could do it all way better, so by all means, be my guest. You take the reigns and I’ll go sleep until July.
Hey relax man 🙂 It’s a blog comment not a treatise or meant to personal 🙂 Ok you’re a busy guy and we are agog at your provider status. I get it.
Fair enough.
But you accused me of not being able to manage my time or make good decisions, and that I was refusing to take responsibility for either. I’m not being snarky, I’m really asking: If I wasn’t supposed to take that as a critique of my character or prowess, then how was it meant to be read?