Sparrow 1.3 has been submited to the Mac App Store. Our little bird is now fully compatible with Lion OS X and takes advantage of the cool new things Apple brought to the Mac. Here is a quick tour of the new features and improvements you should be able to play with in a few days:
Quickly access your labels and folders:
The extended sidebar has been a major feature request since Sparrow was first introduced 5 months ago. Simply dragging the sidebar to the left now gives you access to the new layout. Everything is just a click away.
Send & Archive:
One of the coolest Gmail feature is now available for all your IMAP accounts. Just turn it on in Advanced Preferences and you’re all set for a Send & Archive madness.
Drag and Drop:
Simply drag and drop mails to your desktop and other applications. If you work with Things, Omnifocus or any other task management app, Sparrow will also give you an URL for each mail to make it easily findable.
We still have some work to do to allow you to drag and drop messages directly in labels and folders. It is already planned and will be in 1.3.1 or 1.3.2 coming shortly.
More minimalism:
We added a lot of features and options since Sparrow 1.0 but we want you to be able to keep it simple. Hiding the sidebar offers a streamlined experience. Pressing Shift-Cmd-M will do the trick.
And the cherry on the cake: a ‘View source’ option is now available in the drop down menu of the conversation view .
But that’s not over yet.
We’ve also dedicated a lot of our time on usablility and performance improvements:
We re-worked the sidebar animations from the ground up. Account and category switching is faster and smoother.
We made the message list scrolling more responsive and fluid.
We hope that you’ll feel animations are more natural than in previous versions.
We also killed (yes, we killed them) all window animations. There hasn’t been too many complaints from you about it but once we’ve shut them off for testing purposes and noticed Sparrow felt quicker, we never turned them back on.
We added a visible scrollbar to the sidebar. Even if it has always been possible to scroll the sidebar, your feedback suggested that was not sufficiently clear.
An ‘Empty trash’ button has been added too.
The Priority Inbox filter settings have been changed in Sparrow 1.3 to display all Inbox Priority mails regardless of their read/unread status.
We also improved compatibility with Yahoo, DAV mail, and Mbox and of course, we did everything we could to resolve as many of the bugs you reported.
We hope you’ll enjoy this new release. Check for update if you have the licensed version or go to the update section on the Mac App Store to get your Sparrow 1.3.1.
