Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Sparrow - The New Mail for Mac

sparrowmailapp.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 100 posts

Re: Sparrow - The New Mail for Mac

#52

Post by mbateman »

Overall I like the idea and most of the design. There are a lot of awesome little touches in it. But a lot of small things seem weird. Maybe some of these can be smoothed out for the full release:

  - The status item (why?) that doesn't have a
    drop-down menu at all, but simply shows/hides the
    application?
  - The slightly-off-feeling fonts and buttons
    (especially labelled buttons like "save" and "send").
  - The hidden-seeming account preferences that you can
    only access by double-clicking.
  - Some sort of custom implementation of a toolbar
    that bypasses the normal configuration option for
    toolbars in OSX apps.
  - No option for plain text composing. I know it's
    minimalist so you might want to minimize options,
    but nothing's more minimalist than plain text.

Re: Sparrow - The New Mail for Mac

#55

Post by mortenjorck »

The similarity of the UI to the iPad mail app really gives me the sense of this being a future incarnation of Apple Mail.

I haven't used it extensively, but Sparrow's adaptation of the iPad message list seems very usable so far. The Tweetie-style account navigation might even be better on the iPad than the iPhone-derived hierarchical menus Apple currently uses there.

Re: Sparrow - The New Mail for Mac

#58

Post by T_S_ »

macrael wrote: post #13
there wrote: post #10

seems like it would have been easier to support imap first, and then it would instantly support gmail and every other email provider.

Unfortunately, IMAP is a mess of a specification that is not consistently implemented between different vendors. Gmail itself is not built on top of IMAP at all, it just has a layer thrown on top for compatibility. This path seems to make a lot of sense.

Thank you. I was going to ask what's up with IMAP support. I won't even try an application that won't support multiple IMAP accounts.

Instead I'll ask: am I being too demanding?. As a former corporate goon, I always assume that it's IMAP or nothing. Does anyone think POP is OK for business?

Re: Sparrow - The New Mail for Mac

#59

Post by jfb »

I guess I'm probably the last person on earth not using GMail, but I downloaded this and poked around with it some. The conversation view is nice, but the app is clearly a long ways from complete. I don't often find myself saying this (because my computer is very fast), but better performance would be great. Also, stricter adherence to platform UI convention would be good, if not perhaps minimalist.

For me, I'll stick with my idiotically baroque setup (fastmail + offlineimap + dovecot + Gnus), and keep wishing for something better to come along.

Post reply on HN