Google Acquires Sparrow

Sparrow, the email client for OS X, just announced they have been acquired by Google. The Sparrow team will join the Gmail team to “accomplish a bigger vision”. Since its release, Sparrow has quickly become one of the most popular mail clients on OS X and, more recently, on the iPhone as well.

From the Sparrow website:

We’re excited to announce that Sparrow has been acquired by Google!

We care a lot about how people communicate, and we did our best to provide you with the most intuitive and pleasurable mailing experience.

Now we’re joining the Gmail team to accomplish a bigger vision — one that we think we can better achieve with Google.

According to the developers, while the product has been acquired by Google, it will continue to be available, and the team will still provide support for its users, at least for the time being.

After the release of the iPhone client, the Sparrow team publicly asked Apple to figure out a solution to let them implement push notifications, which Sparrow wanted to use through a different method than the one enforced by Apple. The Sparrow team stated push was coming with or without Apple, but then suggested push would be coming with a yearly subscription after Apple’s decision not to allow their implementation of push notifications.

Recently, Sparrow also announced they were working on an iPad application. However, in an email the team just sent to existing customers, they wrote:

as we’ll be busy with new projects at Google, we do not plan to release new features for the Sparrow apps.

On the other hand, Google’s own Gmail app has always been heavily criticized (in spite of its improvements) for its performances and reliance on web views instead of “native” code in several interactions with navigation, message search, and more. In theory, the acquisition of Sparrow should hint at a major update to the official Gmail offerings for iOS coming in the future, although, obviously, the details are not clear at this point.

Interestingly enough, while Sparrow does have clients for both iPhone and OS X, Google has never offered an official Gmail application for the Mac. Similarly, one of the most prominent features of Sparrow is its ability to pull contacts’ profile pictures from Facebook, a kind of integration we assume would be going away in an hypothetical Google-owned version of Sparrow, replaced by Google+ support for avatars. Again, the same would apply for Dropbox and CloudApp, both of which are file sharing services supported by Sparrow; theoretically, Google would want to replace those features with Google Drive, their service for sharing and collaborating on documents online.

For a background on Sparrow, check out our latest coverage of the Mac client, our review of Sparrow for iPhone, and initial impressions with the Google Gmail app.

Update: A Google spokesperson has provided MacStories with a statement on Sparrow’s acquisition.

The Sparrow team has always put their users first by focusing on building a seamlessly simple and intuitive interface for their email client. We look forward to bringing them aboard the Gmail team, where they’ll be working on new projects.

Terpstra Day→

Terpstra Day

When I started MacStories three years ago, I had no idea whether or not the site would be successful. But I was told that, no matter the page views and the retweets, the people from the Apple community would make it worth the effort anyway. Brett Terpstra represents everything that’s great about this corner of the Internet.

Brett is the developer of Marked, a writing tool we use every day at MacStories and that, personally, I couldn’t work without anymore. But that’s not the main story. Brett gives away dozens of productivity enhancers for your Mac and iOS devices such as nvALT, Marked Watcher Scripts, Markdown Service Tools, TextExpander snippets for OS X and iOS, and a Clip to Day One service, just to name a few. Gabe at Macdrifter put together a list of all the awesome things that Brett builds, keeps up to date, and gives away for free without asking anything in return. Brett is also the guy behind the ultimate iTextEditors comparison list.

Not only that, Brett somehow manages to combine his love for nerdery, writing, and coding with elegance and kindness. I once mistakenly wiped an entire MacStories post I was editing in a Marked beta, and Brett recovered every part of it, no problem – it wasn’t something he had to do, because when you beta test software, you should know the risks (still, you should look forward to the next Marked).

From my interview with him earlier this month:

My workflow is constantly in flux. I’m what people refer to as a “fiddler.” I’m ok with that, mostly because I get a lot of enjoyment out of sharing the things I figure out on the way. If I just dumped all of that time into a hole and never made anything useful for myself or others, then I’d definitely feel like I was wasting it.

People like Brett make this little community of ours worth writing for every day, and the stuff he makes allows me to work better and more efficiently. Thanks Brett.

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Alfred 1.3 Improves System Navigation with “File Buffer”

Alfred 1.3

Alfred 1.3

Released yesterday, Alfred 1.3 is a major update to the popular desktop application aimed at “increasing your productivity” on OS X. Started as a simpler app launcher, Alfred has, in fact, evolved into a much more powerful – yet always accessible – solution that goes beyond the simple definition of a “launcher”, like Spotlight would be. I use Alfred on a daily basis to browse my file system, compose email messages,  search the web and even look for my favorite songs on Rdio. Alfred was once a launcher, now it’s much more. In my workflow, it’s an app that makes the core features of OS X work better for me.

I particularly appreciate the improvements brought in version 1.3 as they address a usage scenario I often find myself dabbling into: selecting multiple files in the Finder to move them to another location. For instance, in writing my Mountain Lion review, I took a lot of screenshots; those images had to be cropped, resized, and re-composed to fit the layout of my article. Once edited, I had to move them from the Desktop – where OS X creates my screenshots – to a sub-folder in Dropbox, which, through a custom script, they are uploaded to our CDN, returning a URL. With Alfred’s new File Buffer functionality I saved precious minutes I would have otherwise spent opening the Finder and navigating with the trackpad.

The File Buffer is basically a virtual “shelf” that can temporarily host files you want to act on. Configurable in Alfred’s Preferences, you can set the Buffer to be cleared after actioning items, or after five minutes if items you selected haven’t been used.

Alfred File Buffer

Alfred File Buffer

File selection is integrated with Alfred’s existing navigation capabilities. In Alfred, you can browse your Mac’s file system with the keyboard, finding documents and folders you need and choosing from a set of actions to do stuff with them. These actions include, by default, an Open command, Reveal in Finder, Copy Path, Move, Copy, and more; they are entirely actionable with the keyboard, so you’ll be able to, say, unzip a folder and forward its contents via email to a contact without lifting a finger from the keyboard. Furthermore, you can assign favorite locations – in my case, Desktop and Dropbox – to a hotkey, and tell Alfred to open them in its own navigation, rather than the Finder’s.

With the Buffer, you can now select multiple files and act on them at once. So while writing, I was able to bring up the Desktop in Alfred, select multiple screenshots, move them to Dropbox, then launch the .txt file where image URLs get appended to. The Buffer was a huge timesaver, and, for the future, I hope Alfred will make it easier to create custom actions (right now, here’s how you can do it) and specify custom locations for the Copy and Move commands (you can type a folder’s name to instantly bring it up).

When working with the File Buffer, I often select images that I want to move or delete. Alfred’s navigation window features a thumbnail preview for files, but sometimes that’s too small to really see whether or not I’ve selected the right file. Thankfully, version 1.3 introduces support for Quick Look through the Shift key or by hitting Command-Y on a selected file. Quick Look works both in default results and the File System navigation.

Alfred Quick Look

Alfred Quick Look

Version 1.3 brings many other features, improvements, and fixes as well. There is now better integration with 1Password, a new way to show more results, a compact mode, and a “quit all” command to quit all running apps. Make sure to check out the full change log for a complete list of changes.

Alfred has become an essential piece of software in my daily workflow, and I’m glad I decided to give it a chance two years ago. You can download version 1.3 from Alfred’s website, and unlock all the app’s functionalities by purchasing the Powerpack.

Brief History of the iPad→

Brief History of the iPad

iPad

iPad

Over at 52 Tiger, Dave Caolo has started an interesting new series on the history of the iPad. With a retrospective on devices and patent filings that preceded the iPad’s announcement in 2010 and a look at old rumors and speculation, Dave’s “Brief History of the iPad” provides an excellent look at Apple’s fastest growing product.

In part I of the series, Dave’s research focuses on the tablet-like products that were patented or released in the past century. I found this bit particularly interesting:

The first commercial tablet product from Apple appeared in 1979. The Apple Graphics Tablet was meant to compliment the Apple II and use the “Utopia Graphics System” developed by musician Todd Rundgren. 2 That’s right, Todd Rundgren. The FCC soon found that it caused radio frequency interference, unfortunately, and forced Apple to discontinue production.

In part II, published today, Dave collects the most notable rumors that were floating around ahead of the iPad’s introduction in January 2010.

Frog and Apple worked on the Apple IIc, among others, including this prototype design for a tablet PC. This little lovely, called the “Bashful,” features a full-sized keyboard and a stylus. It went through several design iterations, three of which you can see at WIRED. As Engadget points out, this suggests that Apple had been playing with the idea of a tablet device for 26 years.

Make sure to check out 52 Tiger’s “Brief History of the iPad” here.

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An Apple I In My Town

I live in Viterbo, a small town in Lazio, Italy, not too far away from Rome. My town is a beautiful place to visit with a rich history behind its Etruscan origins; unfortunately, it is often vastly undervalued by its citizens and municipal administration. My town lives and breathes in history, but very few people seem to appreciate its roots.

I took a walk in the center of my town today, and I ended up gazing upon an original Apple I. And an Apple II. And a Lisa. And a Macintosh. Today, the medieval buildings that make Viterbo an evocative architectural tapestry of art and history became, for a moment, a gallery for the modern history of technology.

Thanks to the efforts of Medioera, a festival of “digital culture” at its third annual edition here in Viterbo, Marco Boglione’s original Apple I gained a prominent spot in the gorgeous Piazza del Gesù (take a look at the location) alongside other Apple computers from the 70’s and 80’s, as well as Atari, Commodore, and IBM machines. Read more

Checkmark Review

When iOS 5 came out last year, I wrote about location support in Reminders:

One of Reminders’ key features is its location-based alert system. Thanks to Apple’s geo-fencing technology introduced in iOS 5 — and open for third-party developers to create apps with — the app can send you an alert when you’re about to “arrive at” or “leave” a particular place. This can be useful if you, say, want to be reminded of groceries when you arrive at the supermarket’s parking lot, or don’t want to forget about those documents when you’re leaving the office. There’s a caveat though: you can’t manually type an address as Apple chose to restrict this feature to a “contact location”. This means the address will have to be already attached to a contact in your Address Book, which can be inconvenient if you don’t want to keep the supermarket among your friends and family contacts. On the other hand, I assume Apple has done this for two reasons: saving users the time of typing addresses, and providing a familiar way to access often-used locations.

For the most part, Reminders works fine as a lightweight todo manager synced across devices and platforms. However, if you’re serious about location reminders and would like better control over how geofencing is triggered, Apple’s software won’t cut it. Because of Apple’s implementation – restricted to addresses associated with entries in your Address Book – iOS’ Reminders effectively forces you to create new contacts for places that you might need someday. So if you’re planning on setting up reminders for when you leave the grocery store, the office, the local coffee shop, or your friend’s house, you’re going to have to configure those in Address Book. Which, if you want to set up quick reminders for tasks that you won’t repeat on a daily basis, is a rather cumbersome process.

Furthermore, Apple’s Reminders isn’t the most streamlined application when it comes to the number of taps required to create a new item with due dates or alerts. Especially for location, in Reminders you’ll have to:

  • Create a new reminder and type;
  • Hit Return;
  • Select the reminder;
  • Tap “Remind Me”;
  • Select “On Location”;
  • Choose “When I Leave” or “When I Arrive”;
  • Tap “Location”;
  • Choose an address;
  • Go back and hit Done.

A 9-step process (10, if you want to pick an address from your Contacts) to create a reminder with attached location data. Can it be done better?

For the past month, I have been testing Checkmark, a highly-hyped and recommended new app developed by Snowman aimed at simplifying and speeding up the process of creating reminders on your iPhone. I found Checkmark to be a great replacement for Apple’s Reminders, and the kind of app that fits with my way of thinking, rather than forcing me to understand its rules and patterns.

Checkmark creates location and time-based reminders. It is a third-party app, so it won’t sync with the official Reminders app, nor will its reminders show up on the iPad or other devices (Checkmark is iPhone-only for now). When you open the app for the first time, you’re greeted with a first-launch tutorial that will teach you the basics: you can save favorite locations, view your current and completed items, or create a date/time based reminder if you don’t want to be reminded at a specific location. That’s it.

The main screen sports an intelligent design that trumps Apple’s design in terms of usability and speed. It is organized in two tabs – Where and When – that make it instantly clear which kind of items you can create, and how you can navigate between them.

The problem with Apple’s Reminders, as I outlined above, is that location is relegated to second class citizen spot inside the Address Book, rather than being displayed front and center in the app. Attaching location alerts to a reminder takes too many taps; a todo manager – no matter what kind of tasks it supports – should be fast, easy to use, and capable of receiving new items quickly. For this reason, the Checkmark developers organized the location screen as a grid of places: these are your favorite locations, they’re easy to tap on, and they are displayed through custom icons and names you can choose from a location’s settings.

Checkmark is smarter than Apple’s Reminders: when you add a new location, you can use your current location, add an address manually from the integrated map view, and only as a last option you can import a location from your contacts. In the map, you can drag and drop the pin to adjust the position, and choose a location radius to tweak the behavior of the geofence – should the app remind you when you’re 30 meters from home, or 250? These are functionalities that Apple’s software is still suspiciously lacking, even in the upcoming Mountain Lion (except for manual addresses, which Apple seems to have implemented in 10.8).

My favorite feature of Checkmark is its streamlined way of adding new location reminders. From the main “Where” screen, you can tap on a location to view all the reminders associated with it; tap the + button in the upper right corner, and create a new one with a title and (optional) notes. Set arrival or departure – depending on whether you want to be alerted when you arrive at a place, or leave it – and hit Save. Done. Unlike Apple’s app, it takes me 10 seconds to set up a new location reminder in Checkmark.

Checkmark also combines a timer functionality with geofencing. Say you want to be reminded about today’s meeting 30 minutes after you arrive at the office; or perhaps you want to be reminded about buying milk 15 minutes after you leave while you’re on your way home. In the Details screen of a location reminder, Checkmark lets you set a timer for 5 up to 60 minutes “after” you leave or arrive at a location.

Another nice touch of Checkmark is how the app calculates the distance from a location. Similarly, I am a fan of the custom sound alert the app uses for Notification Center; notifications (reminders, sound alerts, text alerts, and badge counts) can be configured in the app’s preferences inside Settings.app.

Being a utility that runs in the background all the time through Location Services, when I first installed Checkmark I was concerned the app would use too much battery. After weeks of testing, I can say that with the “normal” accuracy I haven’t noticed a substantial drop in battery life. This comes, however, at the cost of precision with location alerts, which sometimes went off a minute later than expected. By setting accuracy to “best”, precision got considerably better but I noticed the app was draining too much battery.

Checkmark isn’t just a prettier Reminders app, it is a better take on a concept that Apple first explored but somehow failed to properly implement on iOS. Checkmark won’t sync to your iPad or Mac, so here’s to hoping the new Event Kit framework for reminders in iOS 6 will allow its developers to turn Checkmark into a new interface and experience for iCloud reminders. Checkmark doesn’t work with Siri either, so if you rely on the voice assistant to quickly create reminders, you might want to reconsider your workflow and the importance of Apple’s Reminders before making a decision. However, right now, I find Checkmark to have powerful features for location and time-based reminders, and I highly recommend it.

Only $0.99 on the App Store.

Butane for Campfire→

Butane for Campfire

A few weeks ago, I installed a new Campfire client for iPhone called Butane, and I have been using the app ever since. It isn’t the perfect Campfire client for iPhone, but it’s the best one I’ve used to date.

I’ve always been surprised by the lack of great Campfire clients for iOS. We use 37signals’ Campfire as the main communication channel for our team here at MacStories; we tried many web-based group chat tools over the years, but we keep coming back to Campfire because of its simple design, stable web app, and features like Twitter integration and inline attachments. However, I am no fan of the official Campfire application – which is very basic and sometimes fails to load the latest messages in our room – or Sparks, a popular third-party alternative. Sparks sports a lot of functionalities and it also runs on the iPad, but I find its interface and navigation kind of clunky in some areas, and, like the official app, it often hangs on sending new messages and isn’t generally reliable.

Butane sits in between the official client and Sparks. It’s got a clean design, and it supports direct links to tweet with embedded previews, inline attachments, and sound effects. Furthermore, it implements a Facebook-like panel navigation to see a room’s transcripts and files, search, and people currently online. The main screen of the app – the Lobby – displays all your available rooms, and it’s got Settings to enable sound and vibration, as well as “notification words” for specific keywords. Overall, the design of Butane is clean, messages are sent quickly even over 3G, and you can upload photos to a room directly from your iPhone.

Butane doesn’t support push notifications – this may be related to the Campfire API – nor does it have an iPad version, which I’d love to use. Instead, right now I’m using the Campfire website on the iPad’s Safari – it works, but it’s not an optimal solution.

Looking forward to future improvements, Butane is $3.99 on the App Store.

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Apple Builds Mosaic With Deconstructed iOS Icons for Store Opening→

Apple Builds Mosaic With Deconstructed iOS Icons for Store Opening

As noted by iPordelante (via ONE37), Apple has built a unique billboard to announce the future opening of a new retail store in Barcelona, Spain, at Passeig de Gràcia. In pure Gaudí style, Apple has actually built a mosaic off pieces of deconstructed iOS app icons, such as Safari, Photos, and iTunes.

A demonstration of Apple’s typical attention to detail, the mosaic for the upcoming Apple Store also shows how the company cares about the particular aspects and unique traits of a retail location, from marketing to gadgets.

In the past, Apple used iOS icons to build an animated wall at WWDC 2010; this year, they used App Store application icons to create an interactive “app table” for WWDC ‘12 attendees.

Check out more photos here.

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New Apps & Tools For More Efficient Writing

For the past week, the entire MacStories team and I have been focusing on finalizing our coverage of Mountain Lion, which, according to recent speculation, may be coming out next Wednesday, July 25th. As you may have noticed, we have been posting less frequently on the site, but we wanted to get our coverage just right, and I think we’ve managed to come up with a good plan. More details soon.

In the meantime, I’d like to share some links of apps and tools I have been using to research, write, and edit my review of Mountain Lion. As a general tip, make sure to check out our Reviews section, as several of the apps we have reviewed recently have a spot on my iPhone or iPad Springboard. But I’ve also discovered some new gems that, while working on the review, have helped me organize all my material more efficiently.

Scrivener. Per Dave Caolo’s recommendation, I decided to give Scrivener a try as a desktop app for writing and researching articles, and I’m glad I did. I’m still a novice – Scrivener is very complex and feature-rich – but here’s a few things that immediately enhanced my workflow: possibility to organize ideas and drafts as outlines, text, or visual notes; support for file attachments and OPML; document references for webpages; split-mode for comparing “snapshots” of document copies without creating duplicates of a file. I have been using Scrivener to compare various edits of my review, and I love it. An iPad app is coming, and I also got this book to learn my ropes around the app. Even better: Scrivener can sync to Dropbox, so I can make additions using the app I prefer. For iOS integration, I’ve been testing an app called Index Card, though I’m still not entirely sold on its implementation of the cork board.

Marked. To preview Scrivener’s contents (written in Markdown), I use Marked. Its exporting features are fantastic, and I have been using the outline navigator to get a better sense of my review’s structure. If you write on a Mac, you need Marked.

Keyboard Maestro Markdown Library. I only found out about this collection of macros this week, when I was looking for ways to automate link insertion in my article with Markdown. It turns out, the Keyboard Maestro Markdown Library contains macros for links, formatting, lists, and even images. I have tweaked them to better suit our site’s requirements (for instance, I have added captions to my image macro, and article titles to the link one using this tip), and, in total, I’m pretty sure they have already helped me save minutes I would have spent copying & pasting HTML instead. Amazingly useful. More on why I love Keyboard Maestro here.

OmniOutliner and CarbonFin Outliner. I have recommended these two apps in the past, but they’re worth a second mention. For my review, I created an outline on my iPhone months ago and started adding new ideas and notes from there. On iOS, I like Outliner because it supports Dropbox and has a simpler interface than OmniOutliner for adding notes and indenting elements. But on the Mac, I rely on The Omni Group’s app because it’s got the best support for keyboard shortcuts and notes – which are both essential to my workflow.

NoMoreiTunes. I had to look up several iTunes applications in the past week, and this Safari extension did the trick (read: it doesn’t launch iTunes when Safari opens an iTunes link).

Markdown Service Tools. Because sometimes I want to use my Mac’s contextual menu to quickly generate HTML off some Markdown.

Macdrifter’s Dictionary Macro. Mountain Lion features a new three-finger single-tap action for Dictionary lookups and file previews, but some apps don’t recognize this gesture. If you use Keyboard Maestro, this is a nice way to forward any selected word to Dictionary.

Evernote. While my writing happened in Scrivener, all other research material that didn’t strictly belong to the article went into Evernote. With it, I use a combination of other apps and hacks that make it easy to save URLs, images, and just about anything. I use EverWebClipper to quickly beam URLs into Evernote from Mobile Safari; lately, I’ve also been playing with EverClip, which doesn’t feature a bookmarklet but can run in the background (“listening” for every new copied file) for 10 minutes. It’s sort of like Pastebot, but for Evernote, which is nice. To automate the process of saving links while on my Mac, I use a couple of AppleScripts put together by our Don Southard, which are obviously configured to work with Keyboard Maestro.

Captio. Indispensable utility to quickly save new tasks into my OmniFocus database.

iFiles. Following GoodReader’s somewhat unexpected removal of its iCloud-based file storage, iFiles came out with a similar functionality, and it works pretty well. iFiles hasn’t received a major update in months – apparently, the developer is working on a 2.0 version – but this iCloud integration is interesting, and works as you’d expect from an iOS file manager.

Last, IFTTT. If I’m not writing, I’m typically distracted by Internet while I browse around looking for interesting stuff. To make sure I can focus on writing without missing out on cool links, I have set up IFTTT to backup favorite tweets and starred Google Reader items to my Evernote and as a text file in my Dropbox. This way, if these services go down or will someday cease to support these functionalities, I’ll still have a complete archive of everything I had saved.