Remind

Saturday night Mr. Diesel Sweeties tweeted about wishing he could add a shortcut to his home screen that would compose a new email to a predefined address in a single click. You know, a shortcut for those emails you send yourself in the middle of the night.

Turns out mailto: links don’t work in Safari bookmarks. You could create a bookmark with url that contains a meta refresh or http header to redirect but you’d still have to launch Safari.

So I built a mini-app, Remind. Enter your email address, hit Create then add it to your Home Screen. You can optionally enter a default subject and customize the color of the icon (in case you have a few addresses you want quick access to).

That’s it. When you tap an instance of Remind it opens up Mail, creates a new message with the predefined email address and optional default subject, and you’re ready to go.

Offloading my logo design to Helvetica Neue. Flip it, clip it, ship it.

How’s it work? I don’t store your email address (or subject) on my server. When you hit Create, the email and subject are composed into a url. The color (but not your email or subject) is posted to that url. When that url recieves post data, it displays instructions to Add to Home Screen. When it doesn’t receive post data (like when you open the shortcut), it simply redirects to a mailto: link with the email address and subject pulled from the url itself. It even works offline (of course, the email will sit in your Outbox until the next time you’re online).

Anyway, just a quick little Sunday afternoon project that I thought others might find useful too. Check it out!

Update Looks like @jbradforddillon beat Remind to the punch by almost 2 years with MailNote. Plus it’s open source so you can host your own. You know what they say, “Great minds should have searched Github first.”