Mail.app vs Sparrow.app: Gmail client showdown! November 9, 2011 at 9:51 am
I’ve never been too excited about OS X’s Mail for GMail as I use tags extensively for GTD (based on this) and Mail seemed so… Outlook. My main reason for this is that Mail uses folders to represent tags, forcing me to choose just one tag instead of a Reference, Project, Context and Action. Overall, Google spends lots of time fine-tuning their web interface for GMail, and I’ve been pretty happy.
Then I came across an interesting OS X client for GMail: Sparrow.app. Sparrow aims to be lightweight but have the “right” features, integrates with things like Growl seamlessly, and allows me to monitor and quickly “do, delegate, delay or delete” things that hit my inbox. I’ve liked it so much that I ended up buying it from the App Store.
It’s not without it’s faults, and after reading Alan Hogan’s article about the improvements to Mail in Lion, I may play around with Mail again. I’m not sure that I can get over the tags-are-folders nature of Mail, but it’s good to see there are options.
