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Also, frankly, I think people chose Sparrow because they weren't happy with the big boy's applications (Apple's Mail.app on Mac OS X, Apple and Gmail's apps on
by officemonkey 14y ago
Also, frankly, I think people chose Sparrow because they weren't happy with the big boy's applications (Apple's Mail.app on Mac OS X, Apple and Gmail's apps on iOS).
It's a case of "We don't like Google or Apple's apps, so we're going to _pay extra money_ to get something we like."
So when the Sparrow team gets picked up by Google _and_ we hear that Sparrow.app is becoming abandonware, many people think "the bad guys win again."
Of course, I hope the hue and cry about this will suggest to google that Sparrow might be worth maintaining after all. A mail app that people like? That can't possibly be a bad thing, can it?
- keithpeter 14y ago"Of course, I hope the hue and cry about this will suggest to google that Sparrow might be worth maintaining after all." Or open source the app code? c.f Intellicad when Microsoft bought Visio
- jiggy2011 14y agoI've never used Sparrow, but how difficult would it be from a technical standpoint just to produce a copycat application?
- rahoulb 14y agoTechnically not difficult. But Sparrow does nothing that any other email client out there does - the great thing about it is its "feel".
- jiggy2011 14y agoWould the "feel" be difficult to reproduce? Maybe someone in a country unhindered by the DMCA could reverse engineering it and find whatever the secret sauce was.
- wpietri 14y agoThe DMCA isn't a problem; feel is hard to copyright. And if Google now owns the IP, they don't give two shits about suing somebody making a copycat app of something they abandoned. The problem is that good UI takes an absurd amount of work. It's the difference between painting a wall and painting a mural. With Sparrow to copy you'd have a good start, but you have to be enough of a UI devotee to even notice what makes a UI strong, and you'll still have to do a lot of user testing and polish.
- rmc 14y agoDMCA is not a problem. The code ie copyrighted. You cannot copy it without permission (which you don't have). You cannot legally "take it apart to look at the code" to build a derived work without permission (which you don't have). A country without the DMCA still has copyright law.
- reddit_clone 14y agoExactly what I thought. If they are interested only in the talent, why not give the code to the community? The publicity and goodwill alone should be worth it!
- learc83 14y ago>If they are interested only in the talent, why not give the code to the community? Because they have a directly competing product. I'm sure that getting rid of a competitor factored into the acquisition.
- rogerchucker 14y agoIf the Gmail app becomes good enough thanks to the Sparrow team, then I don't see any loss for the user.
- betterth 14y agoHow about any user not using Google email?
- superuser2 14y agoIt's my impression that Sparrow is intended primarily as a GMail client. I don't have data, but I'd be surprised if a significant portion of its users didn't have GMail.
- TorbjornLunde 14y agoAlthogh Sparrow supports non-GMail protocols, it really is primarily for GMail. I use a standard IMAP-mail provider (folders, not tags), and to me Sparrow added very little over what I had with Apple Mail. (Conversly, when I used GMail, it didn’t work that well with Apple Mail.)
- minikites 14y agoWhat if it doesn't?