Liked the article but it produced a weird dissonance in me. On the one hand I totally empathized with his frustration/excitement at building a cool bit of softw

Liked the article but it produced a weird dissonance in me. On the one hand I totally empathized with his frustration/excitement at building a cool bit of software for himself. On the other hand I've never had problems managing my email inbox, mainly because I don't get that much relevant email. In particular, since the Gmail tab redesign I've not had an issue keeping my Inbox unread count at 0(though with my Promotions/Updates/Forums tab unread count in the who-knows-how-manies). I guess this confirms his point about email protocols being dinosaurs, since the way Gmail implements its tabs is tied into their client implementations and doesn't work in other email clients. The overall impression I ended up with was that Slate is simply using email for workflows it was never meant to support and is not very good at supporting. Email chains are not a good way to do project management/planning. It's good that they've started using Slack for chat-like communication. They should adopt some sort of project management app to manage projects. If you've got a user that's used to Gmail, they can learn Trello, for instance, in about an hour. I tend to think about 3 levels of communication: chatting(text, audio, video); email; project related. Each level requiring additional structure and being a bit more cumbersome to use than the last when writing, but easier to use when reading/searching for information. In that sense it makes sense to use 3 (sets of) tools for 3 different types of communication. The main downside is that it's somewhat complicated to transfer a conversation from one channel to another. However doing all 3 in one application leads to the risk of making a simple use case too complicated or a complicated use case impossible. The ideal integrated communication app would need to provide IRC-like chat power, Hangouts/Skype like chat simplicity(+audio/video support), Gmail like email usability and auto filtering, and more than Trello-like project management/collaboration tools(for instance, having Google Doc-style shared documents properly integrated into it). All usable in interfaces designed for the particular level of communication you are engaging it at the time, but allowing you to move 'threads' of conversation up or down the hierarchy easily. I've not encountered anything that does this right. Heck just being able to properly integrate Gmail, hangouts chats and google docs/google doc comments between each other isn't possible and all those are made by the same company.