Today I made my first purchase (ever) from the Mac App Store. I can’t say I’ll be purchasing anything from there again, but seeing as Sparrow was only available on the App Store, I didn’t really have any choice.

Sparrow

Which brings me to the app itself. I first heard about Sparrow back when it was in beta, and at that point it wasn’t developed far enough for me to be interested. But today I read on Daring Fireball that it had hit 1.0. The screenshots looked cool, the video looked cool, and I guess $10 isn’t that much.

No Demo?

This is where a demo would have been nice. I’ve used Gmail from the web since the beginning, so switching to a desktop client was iffy for me. Luckily it worked out, and I love Sparrow so far, but this almost made me didn’t want to purchase the app — videos and screenshots are one thing, but actually demoing a product is another experience entirely.

The lack of demo versions of the software on the App Store has been one of its main criticisms; that being said, I can’t say I really see a solution that not only offers a demo version, but is a clean and efficient way of handling the demo period and prevents piracy.

Sparrow So Far

The problem I’ve had with desktop clients of originally web-based apps is that the UI’s didn’t really transfer over well, and I had yet to use a desktop app that made it worth moving away from the web-based interface.

An example of this is Reeder, which is intended to replace Google Reader. While it’s a nice-looking app and does everything it advertises, I still couldn’t see why I should be running an extra app to do what already works so well in the browser.

I can now say that Sparrow is the first desktop client of a web-based app that actually improves on the experience. The UI is arguably less cluttered, as well as improved:

• I don’t have a junk mail box in the main column (spam gets auto-cleaned every 30 days anyways).((However, if you want to view your junk mail, there’s an option for that.))
• I don’t have to deal with the contacts and the chat; I use neither.
• Messages’ chronology is bottom-to-top, whereas the web goes top-to-bottom.
• The quick reply is magic. Hit R, type your quick message, and send (Apple-Shift-D, like Mail.app).
• Of course, cool Mac OS X-style animations.

I think that Sparrow’s design is something that I can use for a long time, and it will certainly help speed up the minimal amount of time I spend on email on a daily basis.

It Looked Like the Twitter App

From first glance, it had a similar UI as the Twitter app. Thankfully, it actually works well, doesn’t sacrifice usability for the sake of an attractive UI, and doesn’t involve Twitter.

Conclusion

Overall, I’m very satisfied with my purchase. Assumably I’ll be getting free upgrades for the lifetime of this app, which makes my $10 go very, very far. Thankfully the lack of a demo didn’t affect my decision, but if the app was, say, $50 or so, I’d have my doubts.

That being said, I’m hardly an email power user, so my observations are largely from the perspective of a casual emailer; people who spend hours on their email every day may have a different experience with Sparrow. So far, though, Sparrow is awesome.

So, why has the Last.FM iPhone app still not updated? From what that Apple page I linked to says, Pandora can play music in the background. Has Last.FM abandoned their iPhone app?

I looked at the process list, and apparently bzip2 was the process taking up so much CPU. What the hell? I’m not running anything that would even think about needing bzip2 to compress something — just Safari. And about 10 seconds later, the bzip2 process was gone, and the computer’s back to normal.

Googling didn’t help, so: what the hell?

Instead of the minimal (and cryptic) Printer Setup Utility that’s been there since 10.2 (at least, as far as I know), you’re now met with a much friendlier screen that shows you everything you actually need to know about the printer, and buttons to tweak it further. It even automatically added the printer when I plugged it into the USB port, whereas before if I wanted to use it I had to navigate through the printer list in print dialogs.

Even though these kind of improvements are minor, and most users most likely won’t notice them, it shows that Apple is still committed to polishing up all aspects of OS X. Every version just gets better and better.

Seemingly months after everyone else has marveled at OS X Leopard, I’ve taken the plunge and upgraded from Tiger to Leopard. Instead of upgrading, I decided to wipe the disk (backing up first, of course) and do a clean install. The first time, the install went fine, but Leopard hung with a blue screen when I booted it up the first time. So, I wiped the disk clean, again, and reinstalled, and everything is fine now.

The first thing I did (after installing Firefox) was change the dock to the “flat” version, then disabled the translucent menu bar. I have to tell you, Leopard is much better now that I’ve done those things.

Negatives aside, I do like the upgrade, but I don’t really see any great leaps similar to what it felt like upgrading to Tiger. Spaces is pretty cool, but Stacks is pretty annoying. I’ve been using Stacks to manage my built-in Downloads folder (new thing in Leopard) and it’s annoying the hell out of me, at least most of the time. Often I just click the huge arrow to navigate to the folder and Finder and just do whatever there, which defeats the purposes of Stacks.

The new UI (the “unified” look) is nice, but the window control orbs (close, minimize, maximize) look really gimmicky. They don’t look like they were drawn right, either — the bottom looks like it was horribly blended. Not to mention the “shine” is really overdone. I do like the new look for Leopard, though, and to me it’s familiar from using Uno on Tiger.

Unfortunately I don’t have an external drive that’s available for use, so I haven’t tried Time Machine out, but I don’t think it would be that great — I’ve been able to do the same thing for years with tools like SuperDuper!. Overall, while Leopard is a solid upgrade, the “wow” just isn’t now (to borrow Windows Vista’s slogan).

A screenshot of what my workspace looks like right now. The wallpaper is one from Windows Vista, and while I can’t say I like Vista itself, it has some cool wallpapers.

I even set my wallpaper to the black Windows Vista Ultimate one sometimes just for kicks. As for the icons on my desktop, the less the better, and I’ve switched it around to display the labels to the right, enlarged the icons a bit and brought the text size down one step.

Unfortunately Tiger doesn’t let you change the grid spacing, otherwise it would look a bit better.

I started thinking about switching when I read an article on Ajaxian that mentioned that more and more web developers were moving to Safari/WebKit for casual browsing, due to the speed and ease of use. I can’t believe it took me this long — everything is snappy, the way I would expect a modern piece of software to work, and the nightly is running great.

Inquisitor is great, too. It makes searching Google fun and easy, and as an added bonus it looks good. It just took me a while to figure out the shortcut for the search box, but once that was done it’s been smooth sailing since then.

Oh, and the font rendering in Safari is so much better. I’m never going back. Never! Oh, and WebKit is for Windows, too, now. So when I switch to Windows XP when I buy a new PC (gasp), I’ll still be fine.

1. Put it this way: when I quit Firefox, my RAM usage goes way down. Way down.

Fortunately, someone created Gmail+Growl for Google Notifier, a Google Notifier plugin that replaces the built-in notifications with Growl notifications.

So that’s one item off that list. The only other one is support for Google Reader, but the Gmail+Growl software apparently is a “plugin” for Google Notifier. Thus, if there are plugins, then a plugin for Google Reader can’t be that hard.

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