1Īs I’ve written in the past, I don’t use my iPad Pro with a physical keyboard often. Custom shortcuts are reflected in the iOS keyboard cheatsheet, too – should you forget about them in the early stages of using Airmail, you’ll still be able to look them up by holding down Command in the inbox. This way, triaging my inbox from the Smart Keyboard is just as effective as using multitouch gestures – something I can’t say for other email clients on iOS 9. While the left and right arrows are dedicated to snoozing and moving messages, respectively, I’ve assigned Command-Enter to create a new task for the selected message in 2Do, my task manager of choice. Thanks to custom shortcuts, I turned Airmail’s keyboard navigation into a personalized experience that also integrates with the apps I use on a daily basis. Alongside integration with Split View for iOS 9 multitasking, Airmail for iPad comes with fantastic keyboard shortcuts which highlight how the app strives to provide desktop-class versatility to its users. While Airmail’s iPad design won’t win any design awards, its support for iOS 9 technologies is some of the finest on the platform. I wouldn’t mind the ability to switch to more compact UI modes with more elements shown at once. I would like to see more developers revise their iPad interfaces for the 12.9-inch iPad Pro – sometimes it feels as if there’s too much whitespace around the UI. It’s a utilitarian approach: a button in the top left corner reveals the customizable sidebar where you can pin accounts, mailboxes, and other navigation points, but you can’t split the app in three panels to, say, always work with the sidebar, the inbox, and an individual message displayed concurrently. Which is to say – Airmail is the most powerful email app for iOS out there right now, treating iPhone and iPad users with the same respect and attention other developers would only show for their Mac apps.Īirmail on the big screen doesn’t pull any brave punches – it’s an unsurprising adaptation of what’s already been seen on the iPhone, leveraging the iPad’s screen with a sidebar next to the inbox and modal panels for the message composer in lieu of full-screen view controllers. While the majority of “modern” email clients are focused on reinventing email with new display options for the inbox and novel interfaces, Airmail wants to redefine how much control you’re given over your email on iOS. In addition to an iPad app – which mostly follows in the footsteps of its iPhone counterpart in terms of UI and navigation choices – Airmail 1.1 brings powerful new features such as saved searches, customizable keyboard shortcuts, support for send later and read receipts, and more. That’s changing with today’s update to Airmail for iOS, which I’ve been using as my only email client on the iPhone and iPad for the past several weeks. Airmail showed that it was possible to build an email app for power users on mobile devices – asking for a fair price in the process – but I couldn’t switch to it as my full-time client yet. When I first covered Airmail for iPhone, I noted how the vision of an email client for power users on iOS was only halfway there due to the lack of an iPad app and a variety of glitches and technical issues.
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