Sparrow - The New Mail for Mac • Hacker News Board

Re: Sparrow - The New Mail for Mac

#41

Post by redfloatplane » Mon, Oct 04, 2010, 9:30 PM UTC

dgallagher wrote: post #31

johnconroy2 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hold down command and drag to reorder

Control-Click only works for Apple's Menu Bar Extra's, not 3rd party one's, unfortunately. :)

Well, a small correction. Certain ones, most notably iStat Menus, can be moved with command-click.

In the old days, a hack was used to make this work by tricking the system into thinking it was a built-in, but unused, menubar item, often the drawing tablet's status item. I believe this was done through a "haxie", from Unsanity. I'm not sure how iStat Menus does it, but I'd hazard a guess at the same way.

Disclaimer: I'm working off shaky knowledge that I learned three or four years ago, before I was even a dev.

Re: Sparrow - The New Mail for Mac

#42

Post by zbailey » Mon, Oct 04, 2010, 9:31 PM UTC

Hoping this is useful feedback, if the developers are here lurking. Agree/Disagree?

First, it looks absolutely great. I love the "tweetie"-ish UI. A very refreshing look and feel.

Hotkeys - very glad to see these already integrated, but wish they would have defaulted to the standard GMail hotkeys. Since your product is aimed at GMail users for now, I would go with those hotkeys

Scrolling - something weird is happening with the scrolling using a mouse wheel versus regular trackpad on my Macbook Pro. Feels inconsistent with other apps.

Windows - the message panel should be "docked" to the main window by default. a message/thread should only open in a new window when double clicked.

Search - fast (for me, small mailbox) and well done. great progressive disclosure with the options appearing above the results list.

Authoring - a more full-featured editor is a must, obviously. For a beta this is forgivable.

Preferences - getting to account-specific prefrences is unintuitive (double clicking on account)

All Mail/Labels - obviously a "must" in the left hand side if you're going after the GMail crowd.

Performance - performance starts to suffer if you add a larger account while it downloads/indexes your mail? My CPU was not pegged and I have an SSD so not sure what could be causing this slow down. Excessive paging?

NSStatusItem - not sure why this is necessary and I would rather not have it cluttering my status bar.

Unified Inbox - maybe not a 1.0 feature but a lot of people feel strongly about this. It's a must for anyone with more than 2 email accounts they have to juggle.

Message List - consider figuring out a way to show more messages on the left hand side, possibly by adding a preference for "include preview"

Overall, a very strong start and if you could get the above items worked out and a polished first version out I would happily pay you $20-$30 for this piece of software to replace my current thick mail client (postbox)

Re: Sparrow - The New Mail for Mac

#43

Post by j_baker » Mon, Oct 04, 2010, 9:33 PM UTC

Lewisham wrote: post #3

Really great app, but really disappointingly appends "Sent with Sparrow" at the end of sent messages, with no preference to turn it off. Massively uncool, even if I can delete it myself. EDIT: Found this on the author's Twitter feed. Weird interface for what is an otherwise intuitive app: "Open the preferences window and double-click on the account. You'll be able to edit the signature."

It's not that far-fetched to imagine that if it is appending text to your emails that you should edit the signature. :-)

Re: Sparrow - The New Mail for Mac

#44

Post by saint-loup » Mon, Oct 04, 2010, 9:38 PM UTC

Let the waltz of feature requests begin.

Re: Sparrow - The New Mail for Mac

#45

Post by makeramen » Mon, Oct 04, 2010, 9:38 PM UTC

I keep a fairly empty inbox with the rest of my mail archived and labeled for reference... so this app seems pretty useless when I can't see the majority of my mail.

Re: Sparrow - The New Mail for Mac

#46

Post by marknutter » Mon, Oct 04, 2010, 9:41 PM UTC

amackera wrote: post #25

marknutter wrote: post #23

Really nice interface, but a huge problem: it seems to slow my whole system down as it syncs with my gmail account - to the point where I had to close the program because it was getting in the way of my other processes. I hope that once it finishes syncing that issue goes away, but there's no indication of how far along it is, so I can't just keep it on and have it ruin my productivity. I hope this issue gets sorted…

These guys seem to have a bizarre idea of what constitutes "minimalism": http://i.imgur.com/hiO2C.png

I was noticing the same thing.

Re: Sparrow - The New Mail for Mac

#47

Post by j_baker » Mon, Oct 04, 2010, 9:47 PM UTC

amackera wrote: post #25

marknutter wrote: post #23

Really nice interface, but a huge problem: it seems to slow my whole system down as it syncs with my gmail account - to the point where I had to close the program because it was getting in the way of my other processes. I hope that once it finishes syncing that issue goes away, but there's no indication of how far along it is, so I can't just keep it on and have it ruin my productivity. I hope this issue gets sorted…

These guys seem to have a bizarre idea of what constitutes "minimalism": http://i.imgur.com/hiO2C.png

To be fair, they probably meant minimal design rather than minimal CPU time.

Re: Sparrow - The New Mail for Mac

#48

Post by dgallagher » Mon, Oct 04, 2010, 9:48 PM UTC

redfloatplane wrote: post #41

dgallagher wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Control-Click only works for Apple's Menu Bar Extra's, not 3rd party one's, unfortunately. :)

Well, a small correction. Certain ones, most notably iStat Menus, can be moved with command-click. In the old days, a hack was used to make this work by tricking the system into thinking it was a built-in, but unused, menubar item, often the drawing tablet's status item. I believe this was done through a "haxie", from Unsanity. I'm not sure how iStat Menus does it, but I'd hazard a guess at the same way. Disclaimer:…

Interesting. I wonder if they do it by drawing to Apple's private NSStatusBar-like API instead? I'll have to look into that...

Re: Sparrow - The New Mail for Mac

#49

Post by j_baker » Mon, Oct 04, 2010, 9:48 PM UTC

alibosworth wrote: post #37

BEWARE: it appears as though it was auto sending (and then deleting) my replies every time it autosaved. I see this http://cl.ly/2g4u at the bottom of the thread in gmail. If I check my trash in gmail I see multiple versions of my reply in various states, all with a sent time (they don't appear in the sent folder). At worst it is sending out your email continually as you type it, at best its autosaving feature clutte…

That's not unique to Sparrow. Mail does the same thing.

Re: Sparrow - The New Mail for Mac

#50

Post by andfarm » Mon, Oct 04, 2010, 9:50 PM UTC

redfloatplane wrote: post #41

dgallagher wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Control-Click only works for Apple's Menu Bar Extra's, not 3rd party one's, unfortunately. :)

Well, a small correction. Certain ones, most notably iStat Menus, can be moved with command-click. In the old days, a hack was used to make this work by tricking the system into thinking it was a built-in, but unused, menubar item, often the drawing tablet's status item. I believe this was done through a "haxie", from Unsanity. I'm not sure how iStat Menus does it, but I'd hazard a guess at the same way. Disclaimer:…

iStat Menus works the same way, yes. The private API is called NSMenuExtra. It's considerably different from NSStatusItem in that NSStatusItems are created by an open application, whereas NSMenuExtras are created by plugins to SystemUIServer. (This makes stability an issue in NSMenuExtras, as one crashy plugin will make the whole status area disappear.)