We had seen not one but four iPhone apps released last week which made it possible to compose and reply to email messages in either portrait or landscape mode on the iPhone to address one of the limitations of iPhone’s Mail app as it does not support landscape mode.
However, the price iPhone users had to pay for this feature ranged from $0.99 (for TouchType, Wide Email, Compose) to $1.99 (for Side Ways).
Conceited Software has recently released Firemail which brings the landscape mode to iPhone’s Mail app for free.
Firemail allows iPhone users to compose and reply to email messages in landscape mode. It also allows you to save email messages within the app (mimicking the save as draft functionality).
When you launch Firemail from the home screen, you get the compose screen in the landscape mode where you can type the Subject and the body of the message.
To compose a new message; all you need to do is write the subject and body of your message and hit the button on the bottom left hand corner. Here you get options: "Send to MobileMail", "Save to Bookmarks" and "Cancel". If you select "Send to MobileMail", it opens and auto-populates iPhone’s Mail app. If you select "Save to Bookmarks" it results in saving the text of the email message.
If you want to use the email message that you had saved as bookmark, you can click on the bookmark button at bottom center and select the message from the list of bookmarks. After you select the bookmarked message, you will get options to "Insert", "Delete" and "Cancel", selecting "Insert" will result in the text getting inserted in the compose screen. The "Save to Bookmarks" would have been neat feature but the current implementation is not scalable (as only last 4 bookmarks are visible on the screen).
To reply to an email, you need to open an email in iPhone’s Mail app and hit reply. Then hit the home button and launch Firemail. Here you can type the body of the message and hit the button on the bottom left hand corner where you will be prompted to similar options to composing an email message, however this time selecting "Send to MobileMail", will result in turn would open and auto-pupulate the message that you wanted to reply.
As I have mentioned before, apps like Firemail are definitely not the ideal solution and I would expect Apple to add landscape mode to iPhone’s mail app sometime in the future, till then Conceited Software’s Firemail is a good alternative if prefer to type your email messages in landscape vs. portrait mode and its a no-brainer as it is available for free as compared to other iPhone apps on the App Store.
You can download Firemail from the App Store using this link.
What do you think?
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