Goodbye, Sparrow! 8 Alternatives to Sparrow for Email

So, you were looking for a great alternative to Apple’s Mail.app on OS X and iOS and stumbled upon Sparrow. It was fast, handled mail in a comfortable and familiar Gmail fashion, and was full featured. It was all good until you heard that there will be no more new features coming to it because of Google buying out the company. And, if the past is any indication (it is), Sparrow will eventually be discontinued. So, rather than sink with the ship, try one of these 8 Sparrow alternatives to ensure that your email client is covered into the future.

It seems counterintuitive to recommend Sparrow to get away from Mail.app and then Mail.app to get away from Sparrow, but Mail.app has proven to be quite the workhorse. With all of the updates that came with Lion last year, Mail.app is definitely a great Mail client to use.

Also, because of Mail.app’s integration with OS X and iOS, it’s one of the only ways that you can do fun things like email to OmniFocus inbox or setup some serious rules and filters.

iCloud Mail is getting better too, but it’s a very minimal version of the desktop client and can only be used with an iCloud email account; so, that’s not very useful for people that use other email accounts and need more robust features that the desktop client offers

Postbox (Windows and OS X)

Postbox has been around for a number of years now and the creators consider it to be the best desktop Gmail client for Mac and Windows. Now with Sparrow “gone”, I’d probably have to agree. Postbox is a full featured email client that supports IMAP and POP accounts as well as Exchange (for all of us corporate types out there). Another added nicety is that Postbox supports OmniFocus and Evernote integration. Good stuff.

Postbox’s UI feels great in OS X and gives the user a vast set of features like Gmail integration, multiple account support, social network photos for your contacts, a threaded message view and more. Oh, and Postbox is only $9.95.

If you are solely a Gmail user and love the Gmail experience, then Mailplane may be the app for you. Mailplane is basically a UI wrapper around the Gmail client for OS X. Mailplane adds a lot of niceties to the web experience of Gmail like being able to get Growl notifications or even link documents on your Mac to an email. You can also have unlimited Gmail accounts in Mailplane.

Mailplane is a tad expensive ($24.95), especially considering the more feature rich Postbox is less than half that, but if you are a Gmail UI nerd, then Mailplane may work for you.

When Sparrow for iPhone came out it instantly replaced Mail.app (as much as you can replace Mail.app) on my iPhone, but before that I was using Emailganizer. The only two things I can’t stand about Emailganizer is its shoddy name and its shoddy design and UI. Other than that, Emailganizer is a super powerful app that has some great features like recognition of “context folders” (@action, @waiting, etc.), support for basically any email provider or account type you can think of, add emails as tasks to Exchange, Toodledo, OmniFocus, Things, etc., attach emails to the iOS Calendar, and more.

Emailganizer is a robust email client for your iPhone. Too bad there isn’t an iPad version yet!

No matter what anyone says, Outlook is a pretty great email application and if you are in a medium to large company it’s pretty much standard issue email software. With the newer versions of Outlook you get threaded message views, built in calendar and tasks, extremely intelligent filters and auto responders, searching and filtering on any item and field you could imagine as well as support for any type of email account.

It isn’t cheap ($119), but Outlook for Mac is a great email tool that can definitely replace Sparrow on your Mac.

While we can’t say that Notify is a full bore email client, it does a great job of notifying you of and allowing you to preview emails and with its pro features allows you to delete, file them, or respond to them as well. Notify is more of a small app that notifies you of important emails that so you can handle them immediately, which is better than being notified of every email and being interrupted while you are working.

MailMate for Mac is a full featured IMAP email client. It supports multiple accounts and is highly “keyboard centric”, meaning that the entire app can be driven with keyboard shortcuts. There are also some great unique features like Markdown support in the email compose box as well as “Smart Mailboxes” that allow you to create smart filters and base other smart mailboxes on previous smart mailboxes. The search in MailMate is top notch as well; it’s fast and accurate.

MailMate is $29.99 but you can pick up a free trial to see if it’s a good alternative for you.

If you can stay with Sparrow just a little longer (like till the end of Summer?), then you can give Mail Pilot a spin. Mail Pilot got a lot of great press for being the company to “reimagine email”. But, more than marketing fluff, it looks like Mail Pilot might actually do it. Basically, Mail Pilot turns your email into a todo list and lets you mark items as done or even gives you some advanced controls to review them later. Mail Pilot will support all major email services, give you a single login, and even a cool smart “Autopilot” feature that lets you mark specific emails for review at a certain time (like all newsletters for a certain day of the week).

CM Smith is a technologist, writer, and husband. He holds a degree in MIS and CMPSC from Penn State. CM is also interested in personal productivity, creativity and how to use technology to get things done. Check out his writing at devburner.net or follow him on Twitter.

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11 Alternatives to OmniFocus You Can Use To Get Things Done

Sick and tired of the lack of “cross-platform-goodness” of OmniFocus but too afraid to switch to something that isn’t as “powerful”? And what about that little change in the new iPhone icon? Wait, that may be just me.

Anyways, these 11 alternatives to OmniFocus give you the power to get things done no matter what platform or operating system you use.

Asana is the new kid on the block and we here at Lifehack have really grown fond of it (especially Mr. Vardy). You can use Asana as a personal productivity system just like you can OmniFocus, but you can also use it for team and group based projects.

Asana is fast, has keyboard shortcuts, an iPhone and mobile app (although lacking at the moment), and is easy use.

Toodledo has been one of my favorite todo/GTD/project/task apps for many years. Jake at Toodledo has done a great job of making TD flexible, powerful, and ubiquitous (mostly because of TD’s awesome iOS apps and great API).

Toodledo doesn’t necesarrily support “projects” right out of the box, but you can set up folders, tags, or even use the subtasks function that is offered in the Pro version. If you want a decent workflow, you can check out my forum post explaining my GTD setup.

Remember The Milk (RTM) is a very powerful and “light” feeling task manager. Once again, RTM doesn’t support projects right out of the box, but you can do some pretty unique things with tags, saved searches, and locations to make it work in that light.

RTM is free, fast, and has dedicated iOS and Android apps. If you are looking for a dead simple task app to get into, RTM is the one to choose.

Appigo Todo has shown some real growth in the task management space with iOS, web, and Mac apps that all sync together using their over-the-air-sync. Todo supports projects and checklists, multiple task alerts, contexts, and much more.

You can use Todo’s OTA-sync service free for 14 days and then you have to pay $19.99 a year for continued access. The web interface is not as good as some of the other’s on our list, but for a simple GTD system it works well.

If you are afraid of keeping your data in the cloud and you want to customize your system anyway you want, then go for making a custom spreadsheet. You could use Excel, OpenOffice, or Numbers to whip one up. And if you are real macro-head and VBA junky, you can do some pretty neat stuff by programming your own methods and functions for grouping and handling projects, doing weekly reviews, and much more.

Orchestra is more about team and group task management, but you can use it for personal projects as well. You can tell that the creators of Orchestra like well designed things because the app is beautiful. It’s also intuitive and easy to use with its counterpart iOS app.

We at Lifehack tried it out for team based projects, but decided to stick with Asana instead. Not because Orchestra isn’t good; it’s just not as polished or fully-featured as other team based managers out there. Orchestra lets you create grouped lists, has tag support, due dates, and the ability to assign tasks to memebers of your team or group. It is actively developed, so new additions are being added as we speak.

If you are a geek and like plain text files, then look no further than the system developed by the much loved “Lifehacker” herself, Gina Trapani. Todo.txt now runs on Android, iOS, and any operating system that can open a text file. On Linux and Unix boxes you can use the todo.sh script to interface with your todo.txt file with some command-line goodness.

Todo.txt supports priorities, contexts, and projects. The nicest part is that with the help of Dropbox, your todo.txt file can be seen by your main OS as well as your Android or your iOS devices to provide you your todos wherever you go.

When I was an Android kind of guy one of my favorite apps for interfacing with Remember The Milk was Astrid. Since then, Astrid has grown to not only be an Android app, but is now supported on iOS and features an entire webapp experience that you can sync with.

Astrid supports multiple task lists, repeats, due dates, priority (importance), notes, and sharing with others. It’s a pretty little app too, not to mention it has a cute mascot.

Evernote can be used for anything. Yes, even a GTD system. I never was one to believe that you could use Evernote that way, even after some of the “implementations” I found online over the years. That was until I came across The Secret Weapon tutorial series. This tutorial shows you how to setup a GTD system with Evernote. It’s very creative and looks like it could work for many people, especially the ones that use Evernote like crazy.

The implementation supports projects, priorities, contexts, and even agendas. What is really nice is how you can use Evernote’s email plugin with Outlook to move all of your emails over to Evernote and to act on them there, allowing you to empty your inbox.

I’ve been watching Doit.im for a couple of years now. It has gone through a bunch of design changes and I think its latest is by far the best. Doit.im is free and can be used on the web, Windows, Mac, iPad, iPhone, and Android. You can setup projects, next actions, tags, due dates, notes, etc. and it all syncs using doit.im servers.

Producteev is another team based webapp for getting things done. It uses the idea of workspaces (sort of like Asana) and gives the user some great ways to view their data. One of my favorite parts of Producteev is that they now have Windows, Mac, iOS, and even Android clients.

Producteev supports labels, smart tagging, due dates, and has some of the best email and IM integration I have found for any todo application.

Although OmniFocus is one of the best GTD tools I have ever touched in my life, there are definitely some great alternatives out there for every platform. Are there any other alternatives to OmniFocus that you have been using? Let us know in the comments.

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Goodbye Google Reader! (Or the Best RSS Reader Alternatives)

With the recent redesign of the infamous and geek-loved Google Reader comes a bunch of geek-hate. The internet is steaming right now with the change to Google Reader where Google has made the obvious next step in their social movement to say, “do everything now with Google Plus”. They have changed the way that Google Reader allows you to share articles and in the process have ruffled some nerd feathers.

It’s not necessarily the way that Google Reader handles RSS feeds that is the problem, it’s the new UI that has people up-in-arms. So, rather than stay salty and use something that you don’t like to look at to read your content during the day, try these Google Reader alternatives instead.

NetNewsWire, recently acquired by Black Pixel, has been a long standing OS X RSS reader and now can use your feed from Google Reader to sync with the iOS (Universal App). The newest iteration of NetNewsWire for Mac has full Lion support which includes full screen mode.

The interface is clean and if you don’t want to sync with Google Reader you don’t have to; NetNewWire can be a standalone app.

This is my staple RSS reader for my iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Made by Silvio Rizzi, Reeder links to your Google Reader account and provides one of the simplest and approachable interfaces for an RSS reader (or any app for that matter) I’ve ever encountered.

Reeder also allows you to quickly send stories to Instapaper, Twitter, Facebook, Evernote, Email, etc. It’s really great.

FeedDemon is a free Windows based RSS reader that syncs with your Google Reader account. Not only does FeedDemon read RSS feeds, but you can subscribe to podcasts, tag items for later reference, and setup “watches” to find news related to a set of keywords.

The UI is simple, effective, and fast.

BlogLines has been around for a while now and even though it is more of a dashboard type of site, you can definitely follow popular feeds. I like how BlogLines recommends some feeds off the top but also allows you to add a custom RSS feed if you want.

There are also Twitter and Facebook widgets so you can have your social network fix mixed in with your news. The site is mature and is free.

Snarfer is a simple, lightweight Windows reader that’s also free. Snarfer allows users to search their RSS feeds, subscribe easily, and organize their content effectively.

If you want a dead-simple RSS reader for Windows that doesn’t need to be synced with Google Reader, Snarfer is your best bet.

Feedly is one of my favorite web-based readers because it is so visually stunning. I really love good UI design and if you do too, you should definitely take a look at Feedly. Feedly is a free web app that also has Android and iOS apps that sync up with your Feedly account.

Feedly offers a nice way to search different websites and topics and has some great recommendations for starting off with content. This isn’t the most stripped down reader, or one that will give you the most control, but it is beautiful and well-implemented.

Pulse is a little different from the rest of the readers that we looked at so far. It is definitely more of a mobile based application, encouraging you to “start” stories on your devices or using their bookmarklet on the web. After you have selected some content you can view it at your Pulse.me profile on the web.

There is no “RSS reader” function on the web site, more of just an “Instapaper-ish” type of setup. However, on the mobile apps you can subscribe to different and feeds.

If you haven’t heard of Flipboard yet, then you must not listen to Scoble. Which is surprising because it’s hard to get away from that guy. Anyways, Flipboard has been dubbed by many a geek as the best way to look at content from the web. Flipboard allows the user to subscribe to content as well as their social networks and presents it in a “magazine” type of style. Users can flip through pages and tap stories to read through to them.

It’s a great experience using Flipboard and if you have an iPad without this app I highly suggest you give it a try. It totally changes the way that you think about web content presentation.

So, if you are fed-up with Google changing everything that you have gotten use to and the recent change to Google Reader has just put you over the edge, definitely check out these Google Reader alternatives. Is there any other RSS readers you use? If so, you know where to recommend them!

Chris is a developer, writer, tech enthusiast, and husband. He holds a degree in MIS and CMPSC from Penn State Behrend. Chris is also interested in personal productivity and creativity and how to utilize technology to get more things done. Check out his writing about software development, productivity, and technology at devburner.net.

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The Perfect Posterior: Kettlebell Swings and Cheap Alternatives

Tracy: 100+ lbs. lost with 2-3 sessions per week.

In The 4-Hour Body, I profiled Tracy R., a mother of two who lost more than 100 pounds.

The secret wasn’t marathon aerobics sessions, nor was it severe caloric restriction. It was the Russian kettlebell swing, twice a week for an average of 15–20 minutes. Her peak session length was 35 minutes.

This post will explain how to perform the two-handed kettlebell swing, and it will offer a cheap $10 alternative.

Beyond fat loss, this movement will help build a superhuman posterior chain, which includes all the muscles from the base of your skull to your Achilles tendons. For maximum strength and sex appeal in minimal time, the posterior chain is where you should focus. From “violent hips” for power sports, to the perfect ass for aesthetics, I suggest one starting point:

…

(Trouble seeing the videos? Click here, in order, for Kettlebell Swing ABCs and The $10 T-Bar.)

Long before I met Tracy, I met “The Kiwi” in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

In early 2006, he happened to be taking a private Spanish lesson in the same café where I was finishing the manuscript for The 4-Hour Workweek, and we quickly became close friends. He had competed in elite-level rugby in New Zealand but was equally proud, I soon learned, of applying his BSE in exercise physiology to perfecting the female posterior.

He told me the story over a bottle of Catena Malbec. His obsession started when he saw a professional samba dancer in Brazil balance tequila shots on top of each butt cheek in a dance club. Lamenting the lack of similar scenes in his own country, he set off on a mission to isolate the best exercises for creating buttocks worthy of tequila shots.

By 2000 he had refined his approach to a science. In four weeks, he took his then-girlfriend, an ethnic Chinese with a surfboardlike profile, to being voted one of the top-10 sexiest girls out of 39,000 students at the University of Auckland. Total time: four weeks. Other female students constantly asked her how she’d lifted her glutes so high up her hamstrings.

If The Kiwi could have answered for her, he would have said, “Add reps and weights to the swings.”

In 2005, my interest in kettlebells reinvigorated, I returned to the United States from Argentina and purchased one 53-pound kettlebell. I did nothing more than one set of 75 swings one hour after a light, protein-rich breakfast, twice a week on Mondays and Fridays. In the beginning, I couldn’t complete 75 consecutive repetitions, so I did multiple sets with 60 seconds between until I totaled 75. Total swing time for the entire week was 10–20 minutes.

I wasn’t trying to balance tequila shots on my butt cheeks. I wanted clear six-pack abs. In six weeks, I was at my lowest bodyfat percentage since 1999, and l’d reached my goal. I’ve since worked up to 50+ reps with the 106-lb. “beast” (video), which has directly transferred to 100-lb.+ gains in the deadlift.

The king of exercises—the two-handed kettlebell swing—is all you need for dramatic changes.

Here are a few guidelines:

• Stand with your feet 6–12 inches outside of shoulder width on either side, each foot pointed outward about 30 degrees. If toes pointed straight ahead were 12:00 on a clock face, your left foot would point at 10:00 or 11:00, and your right would point at 1:00 or 2:00.
• Keep your shoulders pulled back (retracted) and down to avoid rounding your back.
• The lowering movement (backswing) is a sitting-back-on-a-chair movement, not a squatting- down movement.
• Do not let your shoulders go in front of your knees at any point.
• Imagine pinching a penny between your butt cheeks when you pop your hips forward. This should be a forceful pop, and it should be impossible to contract your ass more. If your dog’s head gets in the way, it should be lights out for Fido.

75 total reps, 2-3 times a week, is the recipe.

Simple works.

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Odds and Ends: An Appeal

George Bush 691 vs. 4-Hour Body 427 –
Since the book came out, I’ve fantasized about having more Amazon reviews than George Bush. Now, it’s actually possible! The ask: If you’ve enjoyed the 4-Hour Body, could you pretty please take 30 seconds to leave a short Amazon review here?

I’ll toast some wine and do a thank-you video this weekend if I crush The Decider. Thanks in advance — it’s been an exciting few weeks, and this would really be the icing on the cake.

Much more to come soon…

Posted on January 8th, 2011

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