14 DAY TRIAL // Sparrow 1.2 has been released for iPhone and iPod touch users with new features, including message navigation, folders and labels, landscape composing, as well as fixes and tweaks. Sparrow has been deemed a much more useful email client than the standard Mail application in iOS.
The Sparrow developers have been listening to their users’ feedback and decided to allow navigation of all mailbox messages simply by swiping up and down.
“When switching from a conversation to another, you’ll see a special separator clearly showing you’re swiping to a new conversation,” the developers explain.
Users can now rename, create, and delete all their labels and folders straight from within the app, and they can now compose messages in landscape mode, according to the changelog.
Finally, nine new languages have been added to the mix: English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Dutch, Russian, and Chinese.
Users hoping to see “push” re-enabled in this release will have to wait a little longer, Sparrow’s developers said.
“You were more than 16 000 helping us on our Apple quest to get the VoIP privilege. We can’t thank you enough for your support. Unfortunately, Apple has confirmed that they are not willing to do any exception to the rule and that Sparrow will NOT be granted with the privilege.”
The developers are talking about a special API (application programming interface) that only Apple is allowed to use. Not being accessible to third-party developers, this API is out of reach for Sparrow, which means “we’ll have to do Push on our side and that it will be integrated as a yearly subscription into Sparrow’s future update,” the developers said.
The company’s blog entry announcing the new release also confirms an upcoming Sparrow 1.6 for Mac OS X. No new features are dished out, but it seems the Mac update is not far off.