Gmail has swipe to archive, but you haven’t really lived until you schedule to see your Verizon bill the day after pay day. If you’re still using the Gmail app and haven’t given Mailbox a try, I’d encourage you to take a look. I especially love when something comes in that I can archive straight from the notification shade. Do I sometimes just delay the inevitable when I do that? Of course, but I also often shoot an email into a time and date when I want to deal with something, and when that happens I feel like I was able to get something… accomplished. It’s the first email app on iOS that made archiving fast and easy (although the lack of archive actions from the lockscreen and notifications is taxing) and that made me ask a really important question: when should I deal with this email? By treating my email as a to do list I’ve been able to reach Inbox Zero (the original version that Merlin aspired to) every day and shoot emails into the future. There are plenty of other competitors out there now with their swiping gestures and their cutesie Inbox Zero euphemisms, but Mailbox has always felt right to me. I still use the stock Mail app for my work email, but when I want to feel like I’m getting things done (Copyright DavidCo, 2001) I use Mailbox. With a text parser it would be perfect, but for my usage it’s functional and beautiful. The app has beautiful animations, a translucent widget, and color options. Today Calendar doesn’t have integration with a reminder app or text parsing, but it does have a month view with details below and a gorgeous Material design. Fantastical not only has that view as its default (it also has a week view for you monsters out there that prefer that view), but it has Reminders integration (which would be more helpful if Reminders actually, you know, reminded you about things consistently) and, most importantly, it parses text as you type (so ‘Lunch from 1pm to 2pm at Corky’s” creates an event titled ‘Lunch’ with those start and ending times as well as Corky’s as the location). In my opinion, any calendar app that doesn’t have that view as a default option just doesn’t work for me. While it isn’t quite as flashy as Calendars 5 or Sunrise or x, it has the full month view with events underneath view that I loved about iOS 6’s calendar app. There have always been plenty of third party calendar options on iOS, but Fantastical has always been my default. If you already purchased Talon then the link will still work, but otherwise take a look at Fenix. Note: Talon is no longer available for purchase on the Play Store because they recently reached their token limit. Talon also supports themes, which means you can customize the look of the app (although I ended up sticking with a stock view). For composition, however, Fenix has the edge between a swipe gesture to compose and faster access to quoting tweets with a comment. I prefer reading Twitter in Talon because it has the option to jump to the top of your timeline towards the bottom of the screen whereas Fenix jumps to the top by tapping the top of a column, which is far less usable on 4.x” devices. Both have extremely similar UIs and feature sets. Talon and Fenix have been my favorite Twitter apps to use on Android. Falcon Pro was the first app to really feel native to Android and include a plethora of features, but it wasn’t long for this world. There have been Twitter apps on Android that have had some of these features in the past, but it wasn’t until recently that developers stepped up their game with features and design. For example, Tweetbot has featured a “Use last photo taken” option for years and inlcudes swipe gestures to quickly favorite or retweet a tweet. It’s a fantastic app that values the little touches. Tweetbot has timeline sync, user and keyword muting (way before the official app even conceived of the idea), drafts, translation, streaming, etc. Tweetbot is my favorite Twitter app that I’ve ever used (and I’ve used a lot of Twitter apps). To my delight, I discovered that eight of the apps that I love to use that I thought were iOS only are now either available on Android or have comparable counterparts from another developer. It had been about a year since I last checked for certain kinds of apps and my tastes have changed some, so I figured I should take a look. After reading Kellen’s iPhone 6 review and discussing the lack of an app gap on the Droid Life Show, I thought I should revisit my conviction that there were still some apps that could not be found or matched on Android.
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