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Sparrow - The New Mail for Mac

sparrowmailapp.com

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Re: Sparrow - The New Mail for Mac

#71

Post by Lewisham »

mitjak wrote: post #62

Like for some others here, something feels off about the design. I think it's that the app feels a bit like an iOS app running natively on OS X: the icons on the left and at the bottom, the iOS mail app-style listing, and the tooltips that look reminiscent of the copy/paste menu. Not to say it's bad; it's just a somewhat confusing user experience, as if I'm running an iOS app with the Parallels like "unity mode" enab…

It's really Tweetie inspired. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but I think the complexity of mail versus Twitter has led to some bad decisions when taken to another level. I'm not a great fan of the non-raised buttons nor the non-native views and tooltips (the tooltips are supposed to be the same as you see in the Dock, but they're obviously non-native and I don't think it's a good idea to emulate them anyway).

I think it's just going to take a bit of getting used to, and a bit more spit and polish from the author.

Re: Sparrow - The New Mail for Mac

#72

Post by mitjak »

lelele wrote: post #67
mitjak wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No option for plain text composing. You just prevented me from downloading this: none of the professors at my university allow non-plaintext email, and will ignore any HTML email that is sent. I always thought HTML emails are for newsletters anyway?

> I always thought HTML emails are for newsletters anyway? They are for hyperlinked text, that is: whenever you want to embed a link in your mail. Many people are not computer literate enough to copy and paste an URL, more so when it gets splitted in pieces by your mail client.

I'm completely ignorant about that. Are mail clients that problematic? Mail.app seems to do a good job at link detection.

Re: Sparrow - The New Mail for Mac

#73

Post by pyre »

mitjak wrote: post #72
lelele wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I always thought HTML emails are for newsletters anyway? They are for hyperlinked text, that is: whenever you want to embed a link in your mail. Many people are not computer literate enough to copy and paste an URL, more so when it gets splitted in pieces by your mail client.

I'm completely ignorant about that. Are mail clients that problematic? Mail.app seems to do a good job at link detection.

I think the real issue is when urls are longer than 80 characters and your mail client butchers it into pieces with a newline.

Re: Sparrow - The New Mail for Mac

#74

Post by pyre »

dgallagher wrote: post #48
redfloatplane wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

IIRC, 'back in the day' when I was on OSX I remember that the behavior for Apple statusbar apps was different than if you went about it in the kosher, Apple-approved fashion.

It might have been the option-click-drag re-arranging or the option-click-drag-to-desktop to remove from the statusbar (or both of those). Maybe those have since become part of the standard API though.

Re: Sparrow - The New Mail for Mac

#75

Post by cmelbye »

uxp wrote: post #27
cmelbye wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I definitely agree. The menu bar isn't for every app to clutter up with pointless menus like the Windows system tray is (was?)

The Windows tray was never ment to store pointless menus, but there was a documented API and programmers started using it because it was convenient. Same situation here. As a side story, a friend sent me a VMWare image, but I run VirtualBox. Instead of converting the thing, I installed the trial version of VMWare Fusion on my Mac. Version 3 apparently has a menulette to access your VMs applications directly. After th…

I'm sorry, I meant to say what the windows task bar turned into. The developers probably meant well.

Re: Sparrow - The New Mail for Mac

#76

Post by pyre »

jfb wrote: post #59

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 stic…

I wish there was something better than offlineimap. It is tends to work horribly for me when run in an automated fashion:

* It doesn't tend to deal well when it is in the middle of a sync and the laptop is put to sleep.

* It recently put me into some weird password prompt hell where neither C-c nor C-\ would quit out if it and it just kept asking for my password, no matter how many times it failed.

* It randomly will die in the middle of the sync with a stack-trace complaining about not being able to call some function or attribute on "None".

* It will randomly decide to hang in the middle of a sync and just run up the CPU for hours on end before I wonder why all my fans are running full blast...

That said, it at least keeps the directories in a stable state throughout all of those errors, but it would be helluva nice if its error messages weren't python stacktraces... Maybe all of my errors have to do with syncing IMAPMaildir instead of IMAPIMAP? Who knows.

I'm currently saying 'screw it' and moving to a fetchmail/procmail setup.

Re: Sparrow - The New Mail for Mac

#77

Post by jfb »

pyre wrote: post #76
jfb wrote: post #59

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 stic…

I wish there was something better than offlineimap. It is tends to work horribly for me when run in an automated fashion: * It doesn't tend to deal well when it is in the middle of a sync and the laptop is put to sleep. * It recently put me into some weird password prompt hell where neither C-c nor C-\ would quit out if it and it just kept asking for my password, no matter how many times it failed. * It randomly will…

Huh. I've never had these problems (on a Macbook Pro); the only problem I have is that if you run it from a terminal window it fucks up the tty and you have to close the session. But it goes great guns from cron and I've never had it lose or misplace a mail, reading from IMAP and writing to Maildir. I know, anecdotes aren't evidence; but I'm just happy I don't have to use the godawful fetchmail/procmail combo.

Re: Sparrow - The New Mail for Mac

#78

Post by mef »

Nice little app! As a longtime MailPlane user, I'm a bit hesitant to give up the web interface and the cool stuff that comes with it (labels, undo send, inline IM), but I'm potentially excited to never have to deal with the gmail html+js interface that is sometimes agonizingly slow.

Re: Sparrow - The New Mail for Mac

#79

Post by [deleted] »

mitjak wrote: post #72
lelele wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I always thought HTML emails are for newsletters anyway? They are for hyperlinked text, that is: whenever you want to embed a link in your mail. Many people are not computer literate enough to copy and paste an URL, more so when it gets splitted in pieces by your mail client.

I'm completely ignorant about that. Are mail clients that problematic? Mail.app seems to do a good job at link detection.

[deleted]

Re: Sparrow - The New Mail for Mac

#80

Post by kes »

jordantbro wrote: post #57

This reminds me, what ever came of http://lettersapp.com ? Last I had heard, John Gruber was taking the reigns. I wonder if it has been deadpooled?

Last I heard, they're slated for a release right about the time 10.7 is coming out. I got a twitters saying something along the lines of "we're moving slowly, but moving and doing it right."
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