Sparrow - The New Mail for Mac | Hacker News Reader

Sparrow - The New Mail for Mac

sparrowmailapp.com

129 pointsTawheed95 comments

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. :-)

Based on what other posters have mentioned, I think the OP's point is that double-clicking on a preference item is unintuitive in a Mac app.

Yeah, that's the problem. There's no reason to believe the screen is where you set your signature, let alone double-clicking would result in anything.

http://skitch.com/lewisham/d346d/preferences

Brilliantly counter-intuitive. It means that the annoying viral-hook message stays there for everyone who isn't sufficiently annoyed by it to actually go googling for how to get rid of it.

For what it's worth, I didn't waste a single click when deleting signature, went straight for it, though I agree that it is unintuitive in principle and that there were not enough contextual cues.

A nice little preview. I can see its appeal although I'm not sure I'm ready to make the switch. One little pet peeve though. Why do so many Mac apps want to create a menuling now? It's not the Windows system tray. There's no good reason why this mail client needs a menuling. It can communicate everything through its Dock icon.

I personally roll sans-Dock, so I like it, but it should definitely have an option to turn it off. Seems like this one isn't even half-risen, let alone fully-baked, but it's tasty enough (extended metaphors are fun).

And through Growl.

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 the trial expired I no longer have the option to remove the menulette, without uninstalling VMWare entirely. It used to be the case that a simple alt(option) click and drag would poof the icon away. More developers are failing to implement these "conveniences" properly.

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

For programs that sit in the background (ie. Dropbox), the menuling is better. However I prefer the black "Leopard" style menulings. I disable it if it has color because it's distracting.

Well, the dock takes up a lot of space and for a lot of people it's not always visible. The menu bar is always there, ready to display information.

menuling

From a Cocoa perspective it's actually called an NSStatusItem (Status Item), appearing the NSStatusBar (Status Bar).

From a user perspective (per Apple's Human Interface Guidelines), it's called a "Menu Bar Extra" appearing inside the "Menu Bar". Though I think that's a little bit stupid for a name.

Apple does warn developers from making NSStatusItem's/Menu Bar Extra's: http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/UserEx...

However, they tend to be more robust for certain applications than a Dock icon or Dock Icon Menu's. You can have clickable buttons, have single- and double-click behavior, display graphics, etc...

On a downside, if you don't have enough screen space to show them, they'll start to disappear. They are ordered based on which app loaded theirs first and cannot be re-ordered.

--------------------

Apple's "Menu Bar Extras" don't exist within NSStatusBar. These include the clock, battery icon, bluetooth icon, etc... They live in a private API of Apple's.

Apple's always appear on the far-right, are the last to "disappear" if there's not enough space for them to fit. Unlike 3rd party NSStatusItem's, you can re-position Apple's by Control-Clicking on them and moving them around (except for Spotlight's).

--------------------

Since 3rd party NSStatusItem's are not going away anytime soon, there's a need for a Mac app (or OS X update) that'll let you condense them into some sort of manageable GUI element.

All NSStatusItems appear under a single instance of NSStatusBar. It would be possible to write an app that'll extend NSStatusBar's class (overriding it, swizzle it, etc...) which would allow you to do custom stuff with them. Perhaps add ordering support, hiding support, grouping them inside a mini-window accessible by a single "Menu Bar Extra" you click to access them.

For example (excuse the crappiness - I mocked it up in 5 min, credit goes to Snippit for the window graphic):

http://www.dave-gallagher.net/coding/menuBarMockup.jpg

It would be nice to add "lesser-used" Menu Bar Extra's to something like that, hiding them out of the way.

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.

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.

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.)

This makes stability an issue in NSMenuExtras, as one crashy plugin will make the whole status area disappear.

Is that what happens now? They used to make the whole windowserver disappear. Not fun.

I honestly can't understand why Apple doesn't improve support for plain NSStatusItems. There's no reason why they can't have command-drag remove and reordering as well. They're just windows, after all.

I agree that some applications have very little need to add an status bar item. Fortunately, most of the ones I use allow you to turn the feature off.

On the other hand, I hide the dock on my laptop. Having a status bar item in application like this is pretty valuable for me as it allows me (in the case of Mailplane) to quickly navigate my accounts and see newer emails without focusing the main application.

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.

> 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.

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

usually putting the link between < > corrects the problem, with most applications I tried at least.

Though it seems the opposite of minimalist, I really like MailPlane for managing multiple Gmail accounts at once on the Mac, without any syncing:

http://mailplaneapp.com/

For starters, it incorporates Rapportive in place of the Gmail ads.

Plus, if you like minimal interfaces, MailPlane supports custom CSS, so you can apply Helvetimail or similar clean and designed interfaces:

http://www.josefrichter.com/helvetimail/

http://jimmitchell.org/projects/mailplane_clean_css/

The ability to have multiple Gmail accounts open in a dedicated mail app is worth every one of 2,495 pennies.

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)

Noticed the same thing about scrolling. Getting the impression that the author has created his own views, which is breaking normal scrolling. Not sure it was worth it.

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 out because it looks promising.

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

I was noticing the same thing.

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

The title is misleading. Can this be edited to denote that this is only for Gmail and not a generic mail client?

They claim "coming soon" status for imap. Presumably the title reflects the developer's intent for it.

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.

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 IMAP<->Maildir instead of IMAP<->IMAP? Who knows.

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

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.

I've never had it screw up any of my email. Thankfully, no matter what the errors ended up being, it really gracefully handled leaving IMAP/Maildir in a stable, non-corrupted state. The major pain comes from keeping it going.

If it dies on a "Can't call X on NoneType object" exception, then just running it again is fine (though it's really annoying that 'production-level' consistently code dies with these types of exceptions). But protecting against offlineimap freezing when the laptop suspended in the middle of a sync (or because it hit some infinite-loop that wants to eat 99% of my CPU) is another thing altogether. It's hard to write a simple shell script to protect against those things, and I don't think that I should need to create some convoluted system of parallel processes that monitor each other just to keep offlineimap running.

There is, it's called mbsync.

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" enabled.

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.

This sounds odd, but just typing in a message feels unusually slick compared with e.g. GMail in the browser, which I struggle to explain. Has anybody else thought this? Is it a projection caused by a pretty-looking interface? Or the instant updates in the message thread while you type, noticed in the corner of your vision? Or perhaps the font choice? Or do the characters actually appear a millisecond or so sooner? Does the cursor work slightly differently? I can't put my finger on it, but it surprised me.

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?

Looks like is still trucking, albeit quite slow... http://github.com/ccgus/letters

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."

When I clicked on the link I was thinking that it was the Mac app I had read about a while ago...and I couldn't think of the name! Thanks for jogging my memory.

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.

I like the concept behind this app, and would definitely switch to it from mailplane if a few things were ironed out.

Here is my feedback thus far.

- I think this is a very nice editing of gmails features, I prefer it to the wrapping of gmail's interface that mailplane does

- The interface feels very "Tweetie"-ish, which I think is a good thing

- The tooltips feel really out of place and are obtrusive and unexpected

- I need inline spellcheck for composing messages

- I don't mind the menuling, but either it is showing something other than unread messages or calculating them wrong, also I would like some options off the menuling like compose, or mailplanes fancy do not disturb feature

I really like this app, particularly since I can click the notification and take action on an email almost immediately.

A few tweaks I'd suggest if there was a way to email back some feedback:

* Better performance (think it's slower in the beginning since it's indexing all past emails)

* A way to archive emails while in single message view (when I click the notification of an incoming email)

* A better way to visually separate unread messages. That blue dot is not good enough.

* Allow me to select how often to sync. I want to check email every 30 minutes so I can get real work done. It would probably help performance as well.

Is it just me or was spam arriving in the main inbox? This client would work well with an integrated to do list also.

Some feedback: - Not sure its exact name but it needs the minimize of the toolbar to gain extra horizontal space. - Spam in the inbox? Wasn't appearing in my gmail, only in the client. - Something about the Compose window, from a visual perspective seems rather ugly. - Growl support - System resource usage seems sporadic. - Either have a menu icon or a dock icon, or let the user choose. - No attachment support

Off to a great start so far. Here are my suggestions:

-- Undo needs to allow you to undelete the last deleted message and allow you to undo a send for X seconds.

-- GMail address book browser. I need to be able to easily browse and edit my contacts as well as add a new contact from the currently active message.

-- Labels (yes, I know it's in the roadmap already). Especially and interface to rapidly add and remove labels like on Quora.

-- Plain-text emails

-- Mouseover/hover states for the menu buttons.

-- Double-clicking for account preferences is not intuitive enough.

-- Greater visual separation between read and unread messages. A little blue dot isn't sufficient.

-- Ability to set how often is checks for new messages. Setting for 30 minutes helps eliminate distractions.

-- It can be kept minimalist by only permitting certain actions via keyboard shortcuts. For example, there is no reason that bold and italics can't be made available via just CMD-B and CMD-I.

Question: When I delete does it delete just that message or the whole thread like in web-based GMail? If it deletes the whole thread, how can I delete single messages out of a thread instead of the whole thread?

If this progresses as I think it will, it looks like it will be worth buying. How much do you plan on charging for it? $19.99 is the sweet spot for me. You might want to use the Van Westendorp method to determine how to price it.

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

Except that Gmail over IMAP never feels quite right. I'm dying for a desktop app that has the same experience as gmail in the browser. Fluid and Mailplane are currently the only way to do that, but I want it in a native app, not a hosted browser window.

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?

No, IMAP is pretty essential. POP is passable, but people really want IMAP or exchange for most business email. Especially since companies and universities often forbid you forwarding company email to third parties like gmail.

Universities are increasingly outsourcing their email to Google and Microsoft. Especially those in the US and UK.

It would only support the IMAP subset of Gmail, which every other client does.

Having conversations is one of GMail's USPs, and I've been waiting a long time for a mail client that supports them (was amazed that Outlook 2011 only went half way towards them as well).

I'll try this as soon as somebody proves to me it doesn't immediately send my GMail password to a Russian spam factory.

Have you tried Little Snitch before?

Is that the app that lets you watch them send your password to the Russian spam factory in real time?

Yep that's the one. Haven't used it in a while but it used to work great.

using google apps premier two factor auth and create a new key for it so you dont have to give it your real password and can revoke at anytime. (assuming Sparrow supports google apps email?)

It doesn't. It only contacts imap.gmail.com and l.google.com

Is it just me or is the scrolling speed in a message thread window really slow?

It looks great and really promising. I'll wait until a better integration of Gmail before the start using it. For now I'll stick to Gmail in my browser and Notify as "quick access" application for my emails.

I love the app. The minimal design is exactly what I was looking for in a desktop mail app. The Gmail intregration was excellent and took a lot of hassel out to setting up the app. I have since recommended this applciation to my friends and family, especially because it is so easy to setup.

One note, when I saw the "Star" I thought it would be correlated with my gmail stars, but it appears these are local stars. Other users may have been confused by this as well.

Love the app, and you should put up a donate button on your site or in the app. I would pay for this.

The reason I switched to gmail from Mail a few years ago was because of performance concerns. Of course now that I have an SSD I have far fewer performance problems in general, but even so my mail program needs to be fast and solid. Offline email access would be nice, and multiple accounts would definitely be nice because I seem to lose about 1 very important email a month due to my forwarding scheme from one gmail account to another, but it's gonna take more than a polished UI to make me switch back to a desktop client.

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 clutters up your gmail trash with every autosave.

Anyone else see this behaviour?

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

Is there any way to open messages in the same window? It's highly annoying to have to open messages in new windows and have to manage multiple windows.

If you go Window > Message Panel, then you get the conversation showing up on the side. I haven't figured out how customizable this is yet (I'm used to it being below the message list).

One thing that always disappoints me about email clients is that so few support GPG encryption. It really should be a default feature in most clients.

Thunderbird has an addon called Enigmail. It's really well put together.

Priority Inbox hasn't been out for long enough to realistically expect it to be in yet, but it'd be nice if it makes it into the final version.

Also, one thing that GMail does right is detecting which of my many linked accounts an email was sent to, and replying from the appropriate one. Whenever I send mail from Mail.app, I invariably end up with an extra copy of me floating around in the CC list.

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.

We really need these kind of applications on the Mac. I love Tweetie and I love the way you can create a tweet using a global shortcut. It makes me forget that I have Tweetie open and as soon as I realize I have something to say - boom (as Steve Jobs would say) - I have the window for a new tweet open on my desktop!

Let the waltz of feature requests begin.

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.

Can you please support vi/pine like keybindings? (like the google labs feature)

Pleasepleaseplease.

That's about all that's stopping me.

A very good start! My thoughts:

* menubar icon needs to go, not useful

* needs a performance upgrade, scrolling is un-smooth, switching accounts takes too long

* as a long time Mail.app user I miss save and send buttons being on top

* I can haz plaintext composing?

* it started crashing on me after I've added a second account

I have a quite limited use of email (with no 'inbox zero' problem... maybe I should worry :]), so a minimalist mail app would be perfect. I'll give it a try.

Edit: talking about a minimalist app being "not so miminal" is a great way to introduce it.

It seems developers are looking for glorified reviews (Daring Fireball, Macgasm, etc) and concentrating little on the problems. You can take the app, and shove it. It does nothing the web interface doesn't.

What's the killer feature?

Nice interface, a little CPU-hungry though.

Noticed: Some dates of some of my emails are off (e.g. by a year or some just days). Gmail reports the correct date, so it might got lost during the sync.

Interesting UI, but it seems to only show my inbox, not all of my other labels in gmail. I filter a lot of messages, so my inbox alone isn't too useful.

Nice start though.

They're adding Gmail labels at some point on the roadmap.

It looks nice, but what is the problem that it solves? That's not clear. I can see the multiple Gmail account support, but other than that I don't know.

What kind of license will this nice app have? The license item on the menu is switched off...

Great app and this is exactly what gmail should look like to begin with.

Great another closed source client for the mac that might suck.

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