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?)
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."
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).
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.
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.
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.
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):
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.
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.
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.
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).
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
99 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 170 ms ] threadMassively 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."
http://skitch.com/lewisham/d346d/preferences
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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).
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.
Pleasepleaseplease.
That's about all that's stopping me.
Nice start though.
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.
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 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?
Edit: talking about a minimalist app being "not so miminal" is a great way to introduce it.
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)
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?
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.