In addition, at this point it looks like there will be many perfectly good Macintosh machines that won’t be supported by Mountain Lion and will therefore be stuck with Lion (and its atrocious Address Book application) until their dying day.
If maintenance updates can add whole new apps (Mac App Store) and APIs (security-scoped bookmarks), surely they can also remedy horrible user interface regressions.
I picked up a new app today called PaintCode. It’s targeted at developers, and all drawing actions are recorded as drawing code for OS X or iOS. This is a feature already available in Opacity, but the code generation seems to be the primary reason for PaintCode as opposed to Opacity, which is a drawing program that will export what you’ve drawn to code.
The difference between the Mac and the iPhone is the Mac version is awake at all times. On the iPhone, iOS systematically suspends all apps activity after 10 minutes maximum making it impossible to send you notifications.
Apple has an API for apps to be notified in the background, but currently it’s only allowed for VoIP. So it’s not possible to build an iOS mail client that’s on par with the built-in one.
The way Leca uses his Mac reflects his view of how applications should look. “I never use the e-mail Preview Pane in Sparrow, or the navigational sidebar,” he told told me. Instead he leaves Sparrow in its natural state: a simple list of e-mails that takes up a small fraction of his screen. In this way, he can work on other projects while seeing his e-mail inbox, because to him, the e-mail inbox is almost exactly like a to do list.
Sparrow’s design is very interesting, but it doesn’t fit with the way I use e-mail. I like to have a huge mail window that’s hidden when I’m not doing e-mail.
