I originally bought Dispatch so that I could triage emails on my iPhone a little faster for work. I make heavy use of flags for emails, but I find those often aren’t enough for me, as they don’t have any categories or due dates attached to them. The differentiating factor for Dispatch was that it could share (“dispatch”) entire emails and send them to other apps on my device, which was really handy for quickly turning emails into tasks in Things or 2Do. The catch was that Dispatch was iPhone-only when I bought it, so I couldn’t take advantage of the larger screen on my iPad at work.
That has changed with today’s 3.0 update, which turned Dispatch into a universal app that works on iPhone on iPad. As a result of having owned the previous iPhone-only version, I gained Dispatch on the iPad for free.
I’ve given it a whirl on the iPad today and am pleased with it. A lot of little things like greetings and signatures can be automated by the app, and gesture for archiving and flagging is responsive and satisfying. I also like the twists on iOS 8 design principles (e.g. sliding right to hide a message draft).
Sharing a particular message with other apps is very easy once I’ve selected one, and the resulting pop-ups are quite detailed. Evernote, in particular, is very well supported with options for due dates, notebooks, and even tags.
There are just two caveats before I’d recommend you jump onto the Dispatch bandwagon:
- iOS 9 has spoiled me with the number of keyboard shortcuts available in first-party apps like Mail, so not being able to configure the TO: and SUBJECT: fields with the keyboard slows me down. However, this is just the first iteration of the universal app, and because Dispatch is so focused on productivity, I trust this feature will come with time.
- Dispatch isn’t guaranteed to work with Exchange servers, so it’s really just best used for Google or Google Apps accounts.
I’ll probably hold off on Dispatch until it supports hardware keyboards better, but I’ll keep it installed on my devices so that I can keep an eye on each subsequent update. However, if you’re an iPad user that tends to use the software keyboard for most things, you’ll want to check Dispatch out now.
© Thomas for iPad Insight, 2015. |
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