> Quickly preview your design on real devices or share it with your team by sending it as an email message.
But when I read the documentation, it seems like you just assume the user has a Litmus account. Is that correct?
Given your paid plans start at $19.99/mo, I think it would be wise to be upfront about the fact that you need a $99/mo Litmus account for this feature to work. Mail client compatibility is the most complex and difficult thing to get right with HTML email design. If you need an external service to get this right, this needs to be clearer. Right now it seems you’re selling Litmus as if it’s your own functionality then expecting your customers to then go and pay much more to Litmus to actually get that functionality.
Apologies for any confusion that this line might have caused.
> Quickly preview your design on real devices or share it with your team by sending it as an email message.
This refers to the ability to send the design you are working on as an email message. When I wrote it I didn't even consider that it might be interpreted to state that we offer device testing. We don't. You can choose to send to a real device, or Litmus, or a colleague. But we don't offer testing on real devices.
Still Mail Studio takes a lot of care to generate code that works cross-device so if you stick to visual editing (without writing custom HTML or CSS), your designs should work well everywhere even if you forgo real device testing.
When I read "Email Designer IDE", the first question that came to mind is whether it can show me renders of my email draft in all the popular clients (various versions of Outlook, web-based platforms like GMail, etc). When I found out it doesn't do that I simply stopped reading.
Designs created in Mail Studio behave pretty much the same way as regular emails do if images are disabled. You should add alt text to your images and plan your design so that a missing graphic doesn't cause problems. Still, we're at version 1.0 so I imagine we can do more about this.
The app handles the HTML part of the email, while the plaintext is entered by the user when preparing their campaign. We won't be of much help there.
As a suggestion, you might consider recommending where missing alt text is, especially on call to action buttons, and perhaps providing a preview of what the email looks like with remote images disabled.
Good mail providers will block remote images by default, and that's a trend I'd expect to become more prevalent over time.
Words of advice. Most businesses are using in-browser email composers (eg. Mailchimp) to create content rich messages. As nice as it may be to have the additional feature set, I suspect the push back on your pricing is going to kill your project. Highly recommend you rethink your revenue model. At most I would pay $7/month for this. If you want additional recurring charges you will have to integrate with my sender(s) and fit painlessly into my weekly marketing flow. Great idea, dangerous territory from a business perspective.
@martinaglv Sorry if this is a silly question: my day job is at a non-profit, would that be considered commercial or non-commercial use? Your tool seems very neat, so I would like to ensure compliance with your licensing/pricing. Thanks!
The application is built on Electron. I think that visual editors like Mail Studio are one of the cases where this choice makes sense, since you are editing a live HTML page. You would need some a webview regardless of platform, but Electron makes the implementation easier.
At the moment, we support ESP syncing, which create/update a template on the linked platform. You can then use it as the basis of a campaign.
It looks really useful and the rationale behind using Electron makes sense, but I really dislike using non-native macOS apps. Still, I suppose it's better than not being able to run it at all. Good luck with the project!
Honestly using VS Code and Teams every day has convinced me that Electron apps are a net good. It's incredibly convenient that both of those apps work essentially identically on Mac & PC, and the Mac OS apps maintain feature parity with the PC versions.
This is such a nice change, after years and years of bizarro-world Mac apps that have slowly become out-of-date, weird, or slow compared to the PC versions (ahem, Microsoft Office).
Yes, there is a ton of overhead, but this feels like the way of the (near) future for cross-platform software. I'd love to see cross-platform Electron-based versions of apps like OmniOutliner, which is an incredible program that is held back by the lack of a PC version, meaning you can't share outlines or use it professionally.
I can understand the sentiment that they’re a net good but our experiences and workflows with Teams is vastly different.
When I use Teams I have to pretty much close every other open app I have; then I use Teams; then I close Teams and go back to work. If I don’t do this my keystrokes lag by about 2 seconds.
My computer isn’t even that old, it’s from 2016.
Personally I think it would be a tragedy for macOS users if Omni went non native but I suspect we’re going to see more native software in the future not less.
I mean, I've used Teams on a few Macs and never had that problem. I wouldn't assume that applies to every user. Also, millions of people seem to be using VS Code just fine.
But they have to support multiple mail clients anyway: macOS Mail is based on Webkit, Thunderbird on Gecko (Firefox), I guess it's Blink for many Android clients, and then there's a hundred versions of Outlook.
If you spend all your time making the output work cross-platform, I could definitely see not wanting to go on to spend a lot of time working on making the editor cross-platform. It's the same kind of tedium, but without much possibility for code-sharing.
> Email Previews
> Quickly preview your design on real devices or share it with your team by sending it as an email message.
But when I read the documentation, it seems like you just assume the user has a Litmus account. Is that correct?
Given your paid plans start at $19.99/mo, I think it would be wise to be upfront about the fact that you need a $99/mo Litmus account for this feature to work. Mail client compatibility is the most complex and difficult thing to get right with HTML email design. If you need an external service to get this right, this needs to be clearer. Right now it seems you’re selling Litmus as if it’s your own functionality then expecting your customers to then go and pay much more to Litmus to actually get that functionality.