There’s a reason why some people are die-hard Microsoft Outlook fans. It brings together your emails, your calendar events and your contacts in a single app. But . . . it’s Outlook. And some people can’t stand its convoluted interface.
Amie, one of the most innovative apps in the new wave of calendar apps, is adding emails to its app so that users don’t have to switch back and forth between their calendar and their email client to schedule a meeting or see if they have time to accomplish a specific task.
This new feature is part of the 1.0 release of the app after a couple of years in private beta. People can now sign up and download the app without any invite code. Dennis Müller, the founder and CEO of Amie, told me that the company decided to drop its waitlist because of Notion’s launch of 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. Notion acquired Cron, another calendar startup, to serve as the basis for its second app.
“I’ve got mad respect for Cron. They’ve built the best calendar out of all the new ones. Very focused on nailing basics,” Müller said. But Notion Calendar hasn’t changed much since the acquisition of Cron.
It has a few new integrations with Notion’s main 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 instance. Notion Calendar users can also view a Notion database (with dates and deadlines) as a calendar.
Bringing innovation to the calendar app
The launch of Notion Calendar has showed once again that there are other calendar apps out there in addition to Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook. And just like with task management apps, people are looking for different things. There’s room for more than just one task management app, and more than just one calendar app.
And this brings us back to Amie. Everything that I wrote about the app nearly two years ago is still true. It’s an incredibly well-designed product full of little details, smart takes on 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 Google Calendar events in a traditional calendar view.
But Amie is also an opinionated take on the calendar. Many people create events that aren’t really events. They act as reminders of things they have 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 about it. It’s like adding a new bullet point to an ongoing list — no need to think about the due date just yet.
After that, if you want to define a date and time for this task, you can just drag it from the left-hand side and drop it into your week view. It’ll appear as an event, right next to your other calendar events.
If you’re already using a full-fledge task management app, Amie has built integrations with other third-party services, such as Notion, Linear, Things, Todoist and Ticktick so that you can either import your tasks from those other services or keep them in sync.
Amie works well in solo, but it really shines if you can use it as a team with your co-workers. Each user has their own profile card and Amie lets you quickly check when one of your co-workers is available by hovering over their profile picture in the sidebar. Amie also supports multiple accounts, which can be useful to view your personal and your work calendar in the same app.
Users can also generate Calendly-like links to share their availabilities with other users. The app generates a link that can be pasted into an email conversation. And now, as Amie also brings your email inbox to your calendar, you can send the email directly in the app.
Amie’s email integration is still a bit basic, but it gets the job done when it comes to drafting a new email or checking your latest conversations. “We built it inspired by CarPlay from Apple. There you get everything you care about on one display, we want to achieve the same for productivity,” Müller said.
The email inbox also lives 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 in Amie.
On mobile, you can view your email and your 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.
yooooo, @tryamie, this is so dope. pic.twitter.com/Cnko44HR86
— alexey (@sekachov) November 10, 2023
More importantly, as many people consider emails as tasks, you can drag your email onto the calendar to schedule a date and time to reply to that email or act on the content of the email.
Interestingly, Amie is also taking advantage of the fact that you’re already in your calendar app. When you draft a new email and you say “let’s meet tomorrow at 4pm,” it shows a preview card of your calendar tomorrow at 4 p.m. to see if there’s any conflict. Similarly, you can highlight text in an email and turn it into an Amie task.
These are the first features of emails 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 launch, Amie is also adding a premium plan. Everything I described in this article will remain free except the new email feature. That will be limited to Amie Pro subscribers who pay $15/€12 per month.
The other big new feature that will be available to premium users soon is the ability to use AI to automatically find time for your to-dos.
In addition to Notion Calendar, there are many companies trying to reinvent the calendar. There’s Rise, Routine, Daybridge, Motion, Akiflow and Fantastical if you use Apple devices.
Right now, there are 14 people working on 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.
