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Comment by callahad | Hacker News Reader

Sparrow may not be that terrible; on first launch, it fetches, caches, and indexes the entirety of your Gmail account. I'm hoping that the CPU usage will subside once it finishes that process, but I still have a few thousand messages to go...

Edit: After finishing caching everything, Sparrow's CPU usage dropped to ~0% when idle. Scrolling, however, causes it to rocket up to ~70-80% on a 2.66 GHz Core i7 MacBook Pro.

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It also uses about twice as much memory as Mail.app.

Anyway the interface is so much better that I'm willing to make the tradeoff!

The app has some serious spikes, but just like you said, the interface blows away Mail.app. Considering how infrequent most people should have their email open, it is well worth the cpu usage.

I'll trade processor time for usability any time. As long as animations don't get choppy or the app starts to feel sluggish or battery drain skyrockets, I couldn't care less if an app is using a lot of processor time.

Actually, Skype is a good example of how to not do it. Having Skype run in the background decreases my battery life by a good quarter. Actually talking to someone over Skype can easily get the laptop fans going. Skype even freezes for a few moments every now and then. And Skype is still a tremendously useful app, so I will even take this abuse. (The new design of the Skype beta for Mac is a different matter, though)

Sparrow on the other hand is smooth sailing.

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