sparrow initial impressions
so, i recently downloaded sparrow, the new indie mac mail client. i’d been following it since it was in beta, and gmail only. it piqued my interested, but was of little use to me if it didn’t have general IMAP support. now that it does, i’ve purchased it and have been using it for the past couple weeks. for the most part it is indeed very nice, but there are a couple quirks that are making the transition a little bumpier than otherwise expected.
the biggest annoyance for me right now is a weird bug that i can sometimes reproduce, but can’t figure out the root cause of. when i’m not using sparrow, i close the window, but leave it running in the background. every now and then, when i click the dock icon to bring it back up, the main window will appear but be completely unresponsive. it won’t respond to clicks, keyboard input, anything. not sure what causes this, if it had anything to do with the computer sleeping, or what else, but it’s definitely annoying.
there is no way to disable the window animations. this is hugely annoying. it might make for fancy demos, but when i’m sending out multiple messages i don’t need to see a fancy zoom-in as i send each on its way. i’m seeing more and more of this on Mac OS apps, which i’m attributing to influence from iOS. thing is, animations on iOS (usually) have a purpose - to visually reinforce the result of an action, to illustrate the user’s place within a hierarchy, etc. a window zoom-in when sending a message doesn’t enhance or better the experience in any way, it just gets in the way.
there also doesn’t seem to be a way to choose where the signature is placed in relation to quoted text. similarly, i love the quick reply feature, but wish i could choose to quote the entire message before or not when quick replying.
with the message pane extended, there’s no way to resize the preview column width. the pane needs to be collapsed, then the window resized, then the pane can be opened again.
the search UI is a little funky. with the message pane collapsed, you just click the magnifying glass icon in the left to bring up the search field. with it extended, a search field is always present in the top right corner. clicking the search icon then merely highlights the search pane. once you realize this it’s fine, but i was a bit puzzled by this initially. for what it’s worth, searching appears to be very fast, at least for me.
there’s definitely a lot to like, though. i love the one button archiving - me.com has had this for a while, and it’s something that’s still missing from mail.app and mail on iOS.
quick reply is definitely handy, but as i mentioned above i wish it gave you to option to include/suppress the quotation of the previous message.
