Spark — Readdle‘s gorgeous email app for iOS has been my favorite email app for almost a year now. It got a lot of things right at release, bringing along an excellent blend of aesthetics and functionality. The team also released Spark for Mac in December last year, and since then, the folks at Readdle have been doing a remarkable job of improving the apps and adding some amazing features to them. Today, Spark for Mac Version 1.3 debuts on the Mac App Store and with it arrives a much improved Smart Search feature.
The new search feature in Spark for Mac 1.3 is highly visual and offers relevant and beautiful suggestions for your queries. As you type, the query is broken down by keywords that you can refine to find exactly what you’re looking for.
The speed of search has also been greatly improved, so everything is ready for you as soon as you’re done typing. This is something that bothered me a lot in the previous versions, so it’s good to see improvements in this area. There’s a noticeable change in speed for search queries now.
You also now get instant access to files and attachments with this new feature. Just like emails, you can directly search for attachments from a specific person and get instant access to the file attachment in that email. Similarly, you can search for a file with a specific name or string and even filter by file type.
The best thing about today’s release is that all the improvements introduced are also visual in nature, which makes it easy to understand what’s going on under the hood when the app presents you the search results. The visual representation also means that you can modify or refine your search queries with a few simple clicks.
Spark for Mac 1.3 also includes a change to the way snoozed emails are handled. First, all snoozed emails are now synced across all your devices. Second, when Snoozed emails return to the inbox, they now display the date/time when they returned to your inbox on the right, in orange, rather than the original date they were received.
Overall, Spark for Mac 1.3 is a fantastic release and it still boggles my mind how Readdle can continue offering this fantastic app for Free. You can grab the update for Free from the Mac App Store.