If you are one of the many people who wanted Sparrow because it looks and works nicer than Apple’s Mail application, however you were disappointed because it didn’t support push notifications, then a new free jailbreak tweak dubbed Sparrow Push by iOS developer Kim Streich might be something you want to install to increase your satisfaction with the Sparrow application. Note: You will still need to pay for the Sparrow application – a $2.99 cost.
Sparrow Push makes it so you can get push notifications from Sparrow when you receive e-mails. At this point in time, push notifications are limited to simply badges. None of the notifications will bring up banners, lock screen notifications, or Notification Center notifications. The developer will be adding these features in the near future, however due to the work that needs to be put into it, he has just released the badge support for now.
Sparrow Push doesn’t add any notification preferences to the Settings application. Alternatively, push notifications are enabled and disabled directly from the settings of the Sparrow application as shown by the screenshot above. Sparrow Push helps make Sparrow more iOS-friendly and we really look forward to the future updates as the badges alone don’t really make Sparrow any realistic competition for the Mail application.
Because of the implementation of Sparrow Push, the Sparrow application needs to be running in the background for any push notifications to be visible – this is a small downside, however it isn’t too hard to leave the application running on purpose.
I asked Kim why he created Sparrow Push:
Anthony: What was your motivation for making this tweak?
Kim: My motivation was that I really, really loved Sparrow and I was just wishing Apple would not cripple it. I am frustrated at how they are preventing innovation. So I decided to fix it. I wanted to use Sparrow the way it was meant to be used by the developers; it had push in the beta version.
If you like Sparrow, I highly recommend this tweak for you. It's free and it will continue to gain new features as time progresses including not only the added notification support, but also integration for mailto: links.
Name: Sparrow Push
Price: FREE
Version: 1.0-2
Requirements: Sparrow, iOS 5
Repo: BigBoss
Developer: Kim Streich
Editor's Rating: 4/5
Sources: Kim Streich
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