There appears to be a mad rush at first of yearly to seek out methods to be extra productive. New Year’s resolutions, the itch to start out the 12 months off proper, and naturally, an “out with the old, in with the new” angle all contribute to this. And the same old spherical of suggestions is closely biased in direction of closed supply and proprietary software program. It does not need to be that means.
Here’s the 11th of my picks for 19 new (or new-to-you) open supply instruments that can assist you be extra productive in 2019.
Isotope
As we mentioned within the fourth article in this series (about Cypht), all of us spend an entire lot of time coping with e-mail. There are many choices for coping with it, and I’ve spent hours upon hours looking for one of the best e-mail shopper that works for me. I believe that is a vital distinction: What works for me does not all the time work for everybody else. And generally what works for me is a full shopper like Thunderbird, generally it’s a console shopper like Mutt, and generally it is a web-based interface like Gmail or RoundCube.
Isotope is a domestically hosted, web-based e-mail shopper. It is exceptionally light-weight, makes use of IMAP solely, and takes up little or no disk area. Unlike Cypht, Isotope has full HTML mail assist, which suggests there aren’t any points displaying rich-text solely emails.
Installing Isotope could be very straightforward when you have Docker put in. You solely want to repeat the instructions from the documentation right into a console and press Enter. Point a browser at localhost to get the Isotope login display screen, and getting into your IMAP server, login title, and password will open the inbox view.
At this level, Isotope capabilities just about as you’d anticipate. Click a message to view it, click on the pencil icon to create a brand new message, and so on. You will observe that the consumer interface (UI) could be very minimalistic and does not have the standard buttons for issues like “move to folder,” “copy to folder,” and “archive.” You transfer messages round with drag and drop, so you do not actually miss the buttons anyway.
Overall, Isotope is clear, quick, and works exceptionally effectively. Even higher, it’s below energetic growth (the newest commit was two hours earlier than I wrote this text), so it’s consistently getting enhancements. You can take a look at the code and contribute to it on GitHub.