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Review: GmailWiz is a productivity tool that might hurt your productivity |
March 29, 2013
Many of us spend hours each day reading and writing emails. This activity, while essential, can often become quite repetitive. Sometimes, especially if emails are part of your work, you may need to reply to several emails with the same short sentence or response. This adds up to a large amount of time wasted doing the same work. A free Chrome extension called GmailWiz aims to take Gmail's own canned responses feature to the next level, by turning this time-intensive task into one that takes no longer than half a second and one click. Although it's a good idea, the current implementation is lacking.
The add-on adds four new buttons to your message interface, each stands for a different instant reply.
GmailWiz is built around InstantReply buttons, each containing its own instant reply. There are four of these buttons, pre-set with names such as "Like!", "Got it" and "Let's discuss", each with its own matching icon. You cannot change these icons or names, but you can change the actual text to match your most-used replies. Every time you want to use one of them, simply click on the appropriate button and the reply will be written and sent for you instantly. At least, that's the plan.
Reality is quite different, unfortunately. While GmailWiz shows lots of potential, it fails to deliver on its promise. To start, the add-on's website claims you can choose who will receive your InstantReply (reply only to sender or to all), and that "each InstantReply button can have its own setting". This is not the case, and switching between Reply to Sender and Reply to All affects all InstantReplies. In addition, you can add several versions for each InstantReply, but there's no easy way to switch between them except visiting the Options page again. Even if you go through the trouble of doing this, the replies don't actually change every time—it's more like trial and error.
Let's give GmailWiz a chance and assume you only want one possible reply for each button. A reply can be simple or formatted text, can include numbered or bulleted lists, and can include URLs that automatically turn into links. You can't however, include links with custom anchor text, or any custom HTML, and RTL support is only partial. So now that you've managed to create four (or less) InstantReplies, is using them painless, at least? Not quite.
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Link: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2032264/review-gmailwiz-is-a-productivity-tool-that-might-hurt-your-productivity.html#tk.rss_reviews
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