Blown Away by OS X Again
So the Mac has managed to blow me away again today, almost as much as when I first started using it, about this time last year. How you might ask?
Well I found out today that you can create custom keyboard shortcuts.
As a self confessed keyboard lover (I love shortcuts and desktop launchers, like Alfred 
), I really missed some of the keyboard shortcuts in Mail that others such as Sparrow and Postbox have, such as the ⌘ + Enter shortcut key to send email. This was a complete pain to me (turns out the default Mail one is Shift + ⌘ + D which to me doesn’t seem right). Anyhow, it appears that with Mac, you can create shortcut keys for any application or remap them to whatever you want!
It’s all done in System Preferences, using the Keyboard option. On opening, select the Keyboard Shortcuts option and select Application Shortcuts. Clicking the + sign lets you choose what you want to add as shown below.
This lets you add whatever you want just by putting in the name of the menu item you want to change/add a shortcut for, so I added the ⌘ + Enter key that I wanted and when I restarted Mail.app, it was there ready for me to use (it looks like if the application was running, the application needs to be restarted for it to be picked up properly).
The fact that you can do this for any app blows me away somewhat – I don’t think Windows has anything like this (or at least, not so eaisly accessed and changed) which means that this is another of those features that Mac has that make it better for the user than Windows!
Sparrow and iCloud
Ok, so Sparrow 
has been released on the App Store today and features iCloud support.
Having now tried it, I can safely say it sucks. Don’t get me wrong, Sparrow is a fantastic email client. It very quickly replaced Mail for me as it was nice and simple, uncluttered and allowed me to send email quickly and it worked great with my Gmail, Gmail App account and my Work Exchange Server (accessed via IMAP).
But with the release of iCloud, I decided to ditch Google pretty much – partly because I’m a privacy nut and I think they have enough of my data, what with my search engine results so I gradually started moving everything to iCloud (incidentally, this advice at Reddit made moving everything bar email to iCloud easy).
However, I was lacking desktop email reading. It wasn’t a problem initially but as I’ve slowly begun to move more and more of my website subscriptions and personal email etc over to iCloud, I’ve begun to need to read my email on a desktop, rather than web based or on my iPhone. So the release of Sparrow’s update was a great relief.
That was until I used it.
Adding the iCloud account was simple – just put in your name, email and iCloud password and all is added automatically which was a good start – I’d tried to add iCloud as IMAP following Apple’s guide , but this hadn’t worked. The problems arose when it downloaded the mail. My Inbox contained 1 email according to Mail, iCloud online and my iPhone. Sparrow was showing me at least 5 emails, most of which I’d deleted from my inbox – iCloud had them in it’s trash but Sparrow was showing them in the Inbox. After deleting them, I’d change to see if they were in the trash but on moving back to the inbox, they had magically reappeared (but not on the server). I could find no way of correcting this and so in the mean time, I’m forced back to use Mail.
Not that Mail is bad, it’s just that Sparrow is simple, easy, intuitive and is a great example of why I love Mac software. Mail is a bit more bloated than Sparrow.
All I can do is hope that this is just a temporary hiccup and Sparrow will work well with iCloud in the near future! Please?
