Twobird is a new email application from Ginger Labs, the company behind popular note-taking application Notability, that wants to make email simpler and more powerful. Today, it’s launching fully after an early access beta that began in September last year.
The “powerful-yet-simple” philosophy in Twobird manifests in two ways. The “simple” part lies in things like the slimmed-down UI that cuts out a lot of the cruft from emails like repeated signatures or complex formatting along with an automatic “Tidy Up” feature for clearing out your inbox and easy unsubscribing. But where Twobird tries to stand out is with new features layered on top that add collaborative notes and to-do lists directly in-line with emails.
The result is an email app that feels a lot more like a real-time communication tool like Slack, complete with reactions, @-mentions, and threaded comments for responding and updating things, instead of the back-and-forth of email. None of it is wholly new, but the approach of treating notes and lists on equal footing as emails is certainly an interesting idea.
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Despite the company’s pedigree as a developer of a note-taking app, Twobird’s notes only live in Twobird; there’s no cross-compatibility with Notability or other apps for now. And taking advantage of all that Twobird has to offer generally means that everyone on your team or social group needs to be using Twobird. That said, Ginger Labs is doing the best it can to make it easier for non-Twobird users to join in. For example, notes can still be viewed and edited by anyone you share the link to, without the need to make a new account.
Twobird is also the rare email app that has full cross-platform support, with a web app along with iOS, Android, macOS, and Windows versions of the software available. Right now, Twobird only supports Gmail and G Suite accounts, but the company is working on adding Outlook support in the future, too. The apps are also free to use, with the goal to keep it that way for consumers while eventually adding premium paid tiers for larger teams down the line.
