New URL features can make your e-mail productive again
Alt: Link to your e-mail from external apps, get productive again — One of the incredibly useful things about Mac OS X in general is the potential for integration between applications. Type the name of an Address Book contact …
Context & Ripple Effects
The story lands mid-way through a year when e-mail productivity was being solved by workarounds rather than platform features — earlier in 2007, coverage of three solid Gmail productivity tips showed users stitching together filters and keyboard tricks inside the web client. What changes here is where the integration lives: instead of hacks inside one client, Mac OS X exposes URL schemes that let any external application link straight to an e-mail message or an Address Book contact.
First-order effects
- Users of task managers, note-taking tools, and other external Mac applications can now embed direct links to specific e-mail messages and contacts, turning the inbox into a referenceable object rather than a silo.
Second-order effects
- Third-party Mac developers gain an incentive to build against these URL hooks, since deep-linking into Mail and Address Book becomes a differentiator for any productivity app competing on workflow integration.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the operating system rather than the individual application becomes the integration layer for personal information — e-mail, contacts, and tasks connected by system-level URLs instead of per-app exports.
The trend: E-mail is shifting from a self-contained client toward a component in an OS-wide workflow, with system URL schemes replacing single-app workarounds as the integration mechanism.