Sparrow chirps out feature list for version 1.1
Several of the bloggers here at TUAW, including myself, are big fans of Sparrow. It's a very Twitter-like Mac email app that is fast, feature filled and has a clean user interface -- and it doesn't have a Quick Bar. Today the Sparrow team announced that Sparrow 1.1 will be submitted to the Mac App Store within a few days, and that the app should be available by the end of March.
The big change for Sparrow is that the new version will support most IMAP accounts, not just Gmail IMAP accounts. Any MobileMe, Yahoo or AOL account can now be added to Sparrow, and custom IMAP providers like Rackspace, Fastmail, Zimbra and Dreamhost are also supported.
At the present time, signatures are customizable by account. Version 1.1 adds "per alias" signatures, so that if you have multiple aliases for a single account, each alias can have a custom signature. There's a new formatting bar for helping you compose more beautiful emails. It provides flexibility in selecting fonts, font size, text color, quote levels, links and list formatting.
To retain the clean inbox that Sparrow is well known for, busy users will have a new "minimal mode" to hide the message preview in the list of messages. That'll be helpful when we do giveaways here at TUAW and get tons of comment emails.
Sparrow will also gain a bunch of multi-touch gestures, including a pinch to open or close a message and three-finger swipes to open and close the panel, navigate the message list or switch accounts. Contact groups will be supported as well.
All in all, Sparrow 1.1 looks like it will be a winner. Goodbye, Mail.app!
