I’d be lying if I told you that I was able to write this blog post without thinking too much about how to phrase it. It took me long enough to even think of an introduction, so here goes..
Sparrow. It’s an email client that can be as minimalistic or as fully featured as you want it to be. It has all the perks of Apple’s built in email client, Mail, just without all the clutter and useless screen-taking-UI. What I love about this app is that it stays current with the latest development without increasing in complexity, it has all the features you would expect from a current-generation mail client, again, without the cruft.
In essence what you get with Sparrow is a choice of the minimalistic view of just the emails in your inbox (plus an array of pretty icons down the site corresponding to other areas) or you get the full screen (yes, even native Lion full screen) of a detailed view of emails in your inbox, the current email selected and the Extended Sidebar which allows grouping of email by Labels (if you use Gmail that is!)
Sending emails is as simple as hitting the New Mail button, (or Cmd + N if you’re feeling technical!) this brings up a new window allowing you to select your recipients, the subject title and the content of your email – pretty standard right? That’s right up until you get to the attachments part, which in my opinion is the single reason I’ve stuck with Sparrow for any great length, but that’s something I’ll come back to. Sparrow in itself seems to aim to be a social email client, it allows you to connect yourself to Facebook, whereby you can see the notification emails straight in Sparrow, as well as friends’ contact pictures next to the corresponding message (you can also see who else out of your friends uses the app).
I suppose I shouldn’t really continue this review without mentioning the beautiful colours and layout of Sparrow’s interface, the off-black they use on the extended sidebar is just amazing, perfect choice. This is complemented further by the quality of the icons, the background on the panel when you have no email selected (yes, I dug that deep) and even the dock icon. 
Okay, so remember me saying I’d come back to something, well here it is – Dropbox integration
Attachments can be sent via Dropbox, meaning that they are saved in your Dropbox and a public link is hidden from the rest of the world allowing you to safely and securely transfer a file without having to give out a shortened URL (which as I’ve discovered is just as confusing as telling people to download something you’re trying to show them from a website).
All in all Sparrow is a gorgeous, well designed, highly featured, simple and perfect alternative to Apple’s built in Mail client. Did I mention it’s gorgeous?
Related posts:
