Building Sparrow for Mac

Hoà and Leca set out to build something they'd use every day, a desktop email client that works seamlessly with Gmail and its variety of nuances like labels, Stars, and "Send And Archive" buttons. First, the app needed a name.

A sparrow is not a particularly colorful or fascinating bird — especially when pit against ultra-pheasants like the Mac Mail app’s Eagle or Mozilla’s Thunderbird — and this is what attracted Leca and Hoà to it symbolically. "We wanted to convey a sense of speed, and the fact that the app is small and doesn’t take up much screen real estate." But, they still wanted to stick with the bird theme you can find in many communication applications like Twitter and the aforementioned mail apps.

The first step in building Sparrow for Mac was simple, Leca told me. "We'd look at the current Gmail interface and at mail clients like Postbox to see what they were doing right in letting you access Gmail. Our guiding principal was to have the app be the opposite of a full screen app. You should be able to check your mail with a Pages document open."

The way Leca uses his Mac reflects his view of how applications should look. "I never use the email Preview Pane in Sparrow, or the navigational sidebar," he told told me. Instead he leaves Sparrow in its natural state: a simple list of emails that takes up a small fraction of his screen. In this way, he can work on other projects while seeing his email inbox, because to him, the email inbox is almost exactly like a to do list. "Our main goal was using our new app to reach Inbox Zero every day. Your work is done when your inbox is empty."

The primary visual inspiration for Sparrow was the visionary work of Loren Brichter, the user interface genius who designed Tweetie for iPhone and Twitter for Mac. Leca loves Brichter’s trademark left-side navigational sidebars, meticulously designed glowing icons, and "widget-like" aspects of Twitter for Mac that enable you to focus on many applications at once.

Freelance designer Jean-Marc Denis, another student of the Brichter school, loved the first iteration of Sparrow so much that he contacted Leca and offered to re-do the app’s icons and sidebar for free. "Sparrow is great software but it looks like shit," he told Leca. Denis joined the team full time as designer, and Sparrow was born. The team has even acquired Brichter as a quiet mentor who provides advice and wisdom every week or so.