Last Thursday was a sad day for Sparrow users round the world. The company announced, in quite a surprise turn, that it had been acquired by Google and that any new features for their Mac and iOS apps will no longer be developed – presumably because the team are now busy overhauling the default Gmail client with some of Sparrow’s fancy features.
Sparrow was acquired by Google last week for an undisclosed sum and no future features for Sparrow’s Mac and iOS apps will be developed.
Now I, for one, was a little angry at this change (expressing my true anger would make this article definitely NSFW) and it seems that I am not alone in my thoughts. There are plenty of other commentators around the Net who have expressed their anger at this change, presumably because the developers at Sparrow are now dedicating all their resources towards Google, not their own projects. As I had shelled out around $13 of my hard-earned cash to Sparrow for the privelege of owing their programs on my Mac and iPhone, the move made me, at least, feel a little betrayed – especially seeing as I will see no new features in future releases, just the standard bug fixes.
So, what does this mean for the future of e-mail on OS X? Well thankfully, there are at least a couple of lights at the end of the tunnel. Of course, you can always stick to the default option of Mail.app on OS X or go for one of the many alternatives (Postbox, for example) but the problem with these is they don’t really do anything completely differently. I don’t really like the default e-mail app in OS X and because I use an Exchange-based email system, my only real option is Microsoft Outlook, which I grabbed along with Office 2011 for Mac at a discounted student price.
As someone who uses an Exchange-based mail system, Outlook is often my only other alternative to Mail.app for full support.
But at the end of the day, most of the email clients available for Mac nowadays are all the same. And, after all, we are Mac users so we want something new and innovative – if we didn’t then we wouldn’t have bought a Mac. I’ll freely admit that there are several features in, say, Mountain Lion which Microsoft haven’t even yet contemplated, yet alone started developing, such as system-wide notifications, so Apple are kind of already ahead on that game. But email still trails behind, though. Sure, Mail.app got an update with Lion but that was just to make it look like the iPad client (which I also don’t like – I’m a tough guy to please, by the way).
So it begs the question: what’s in store for email on OS X? The first alternative is dotmailapp (or .Mail) which promises to reinvent mail as we know it (which, according to them, hasn’t changed much since the 1970s, when the first email was sent). Apart from its gorgeous interface and website which brings tears of joy to your eyes), it promises Actionsteps, which are designed to help you prioritise your email a lot easier through simple clicks and differently shaded squares, a dark red one for important and a light red one for not so important.
Actionsteps in dotmailapp is an approach to e-mail never really seen before.
What’s more, it’s being designed by Tobias van Schneider, a German art director and user interface designer so it’s really got a touch of class and style in there, unlike other email clients which tend to prioritise functionality over aesthetics, something which I feel should really, at least on the Mac platform, go hand in hand with each other. Many clients seem to sacrifice one for the other and the results can sometimes be undesirable – you’ve either got a really stylish e-mail client that doesn’t really do anything or a really powerful one with tonnes of great features that looks like the back end of a bus.
The interface in the upcoming dotmailapp is drop dead gorgeous – clean, simplistic and easy to use.
Another one in the works which also looks extremely promising is Mail Pilot, which is currently backed by over 1,600 people on the funding platform Kickstarter and has received around $54,000 worth of pledges (much more than the planned $35,000). The project, however, is a lot more bolder approach to redesigning email than dotmailapp which I looked at above. Instead of reading e-mails one by one, when a new mail arrives it is marked as incomplete (like in a task manager). You then read through that e-mail then mark it off as complete once you’ve finished with it.
Mail Pilot processes your e-mail like a task manager, with incoming e-mails being marked as “to review”.
Any messages that are marked off as complete are then archived automatically to try to avoid any inbox clutter. If an e-mail arrives and you don’t have time for it at that particular moment, you can mark it down for review and Mail Pilot will automatically remind you in a period of time (which is set by you) to look at it again – thereby ensuring that nothing is forgotten! The other great feature about Mail Pilot is that is works with virtually every single mail account, so you aren’t tied down to any particular platform.
Unfortunately for us consumers there’s no public betas for both of the clients I’ve looked at today but I’m told that they will be arriving sometime “this summer” so come the end of August I’m sure we’ll be able to test them both out. However, given the exciting new features and intuitive workflow pattern demonstrated in the applications featured above, it can definitely be said that the future of e-mail really is on OS X. We really do need a different way of dealing with our e-mails – I dread it when I’m hovering over the Lotus Notes icon on my desktop on Monday morning at work and it often takes me a good hour to work through my backlog.
I’d certainly be looking for a new way of sorting through my e-mails and I’m sure I’m not alone on this front. How often do we spend at home, work or in our spare time just looking through and trying to deal with all those little unread items in our inbox? With these two fantastic projects currently in progress, the future is looking bright. And I’m sure it’ll be a relief to almost everyone.