Dom Leca on UI Conventions and Sparrow 2.0

Sparrow’s Dom Leca on The Verge:

What’s the give and take between adhering to popular OS X UI conventions and going in your own direction?

I think there is a huge variety of design on OS X but the 2 main choices that a developer / designer really has are the orthodox way, sticking with the Apple HIG in a strict manner, or the Loren Brichter’s way.

I am not saying that there is no in-between. A lot of our inspiration in Sparrow comes from other developers who are not strictly following the HIG or Loren’s UI style. But like on the iPhone with the pull to refresh or the cell swipe, Loren created a new standard with its Tweetie core animation sidebar.

Jared Erondu has another interview with Leca today over at Macgasm today; in the article, Leca mentions some of the future plans for Sparrow 2.0, including a people-centric view for the desktop application:

The main idea we have for version two is that the concept of messages will be thrown in the background and people will take a central place. It will be a people centric app. You won’t look for the last message you received, but for the last people who talked with you. In terms of navigation, and the way you will treat your mail, the functioning of labels, folders and stuff like that – it changes the way it works a lot.

Sparrow may have borrowed a lot from Brichter’s Tweetie design, but in the past year the app has been constantly updated, adding innovative functionalities that you can’t find anywhere else (CloudApp and Dropbox integration for attachments is a personal favorite). Whilst Sparrow recognized Brichter’s UI approach as functional to what they were trying to achieve (switching accounts) and iterated on the concept blending that specific UI convention with new Lion elements, standard HIG stuff and their own vision, others have – unfortunately – blindly re-implemented Tweetie’s design adding little or no innovation to the mix.

This is what the first Sparrow beta looked like. With Sparrow for iPhone announced in August and now nearing the beta stage, I have big expectations for Sparrow in 2012.