There’s a reason why some people are die-hard fans of Microsoft Outlook. It brings together your email, calendar events, and contacts in a single app. But . . . it’s Outlook. And some people can’t stand its complicated interface.
Amyone of the most innovative apps in the new wave of calendar apps adds email to its app so users don’t have to switch between their calendar and email client to schedule a meeting or see if they have time to complete a specific task.
This new feature is part of version 1.0 of the app after a few years in private beta. Users can now register and download the app without an invite code. Dennis Müller, the founder and CEO of Amie, told me that the company decided to drop its waiting list because of Notion’s release of the Notion Calendar last week.
“I expected their launch to be negative for us. It ended up being very positive,” Müller told me in an email. Sense acquired Cron, another calendar startup, which will serve as the basis for her second application.
“I have mad respect for Kron. They have made the best calendar of all news. Very focused on the basics of nailing,” Müller said. But Notion Calendar hasn’t changed much since the Cron acquisition.
It has some new integrations with the main Notion app and service, such as the ability to create a Notion document and attach it to an event — this could be useful for meeting notes, for example. Notion Calendar users can also view a Notion database (with dates and deadlines) as a calendar.
Bringing innovation to your calendar app
The release of Notion Calendar once again showed that there are other calendar apps besides Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook. And as with task management apps, people are looking for different things. There’s room for more than one task manager app and more than one calendar app.
And that brings us back to Amie. Everything I wrote about the app almost two years ago still applies. It’s an incredibly well-designed product full of small details, clever renderings of the interaction model, and nice animations.
As a reminder, Amie is a calendar app that works with your Google account. After signing up, the company imports and displays your events in Google Calendar in a traditional calendar view.
But Amie is also a diary view. Many people make up facts that are not real facts. They act as reminders of things to do throughout the week.
That’s why Amie also lets you manage your to-do list. In the left column, you can create tasks without thinking too much. It’s like adding a new bullet to an ongoing list — you don’t have to think about the due date yet.
After that, if you want to set a date and time for that task, you can just drag it from the left side and drop it into the week view. It will appear as an event, right next to your other calendar events.
If you’re already using a full-fledged task management app, Amie has built-in integrations with other third-party services like Notion, Linear, Things, Todoist, and Ticktick, so you can either import your tasks from those other services or keep them in sync .
Amie works well solo, but really shines if you can use her as a team with your teammates. Each user has their own profile card, and Amie lets you quickly check when one of your colleagues is available by hovering over their profile picture in the sidebar. Amie also supports multiple accounts, which can be useful for viewing your staff and work calendar in the same app.
Users can also create Calendly-style links to share their availabilities with other users. The app creates a link that can be pasted into an email conversation. And now, since Amie also brings your inbox to your calendar, you can send the email right in the app.
Amie’s email integration is still a bit basic, but it gets the job done when it comes to composing a new email or checking your latest conversations. “We built it inspired by Apple’s CarPlay. There you will find everything you care about on one screen, we want to achieve the same for productivity,” said Müller.
Incoming emails are also in the left column. It appears as another to-do list that refreshes in real time as new emails arrive. You can click on an email to read it and reply directly to Amie.
On mobile, you can view your email and calendar using an extremely satisfying split screen feature. You can drag and drop the divider in the middle of the screen to see more of your inbox or more of your calendar.
Most importantly, since many people think of emails as tasks, you can drag your email to the calendar to schedule a date and time to respond to that email or act on the content of the email.
Interestingly, Amie also takes advantage of the fact that you’re already in your calendar app. When you compose a new email and say “let’s meet tomorrow at 4pm” Similarly, you can highlight text in an email and turn it into an Amie task.
Image Credits: Amy
These are the first email features in Amie. I can’t wait to see the smart features that could be added now that Amie can see both your calendar and your inbox.
With this release, Amie is also adding a premium plan. Everything I described in this article will remain free except for the new email feature. This will be limited to Amie Pro subscribers who pay $15/€12 per month.
The other big new feature coming soon to premium users is the ability to use AI to automatically find time for your to-dos.
Besides the Notion Calendar, there are many companies trying to reinvent the calendar. Exists Increase, Routine, Daybridge, Movement, Akiflow and Fantastic if you use Apple devices.
There are currently 14 people working for Amie and the company has raised $8 million in total. So let’s see if it can stand out from the competition in 2024 and become “a one-in-a-million product,” as Müller told me.
Image Credits: Amy
