Kiwi for Gmail is simple and elegant in all the best ways. It’s also fast, reliable and a Gmail users dream. That could be my review of the software in two sentences, but allow me to elaborate.
The icon is gorgeous and serves as the foundation of Kiwi’s color scheme. If it was designed in mind to stand out on your dock, then the designers have accomplished that goal.
To give you some background on Kiwi, it was originally called Gmail for Mac. Shortly after Zive’s successful Kickstarter campaign, Google reached out to the company and brought up some concerns about brand confusion. This led the team at Zive back to the drawing board.
In retrospect, that was the best thing that could have happened to them because it forced the team to critically think and design outside of the box and the outcome was refreshing.
Above is one of the panels shown during Kiwi’s initial launch. A series of these explain the apps functionality. I didn’t mind the mini-tutorial (although I feel the app is very intuitive) and after it finished, I was confident that I knew how Kiwi functioned.
When it comes down to using Gmail through Kiwi, it’s the same experience as it would be in the browser, but Kiwi doesn’t just offer a Gmail instance in a separate app. That functionality could already be accomplished with applications like Fluid. Where Kiwi really shines is in its fast account switching, notification customization, quick access within the OS and overall speed.
In Kiwi, switching between multiple Gmail accounts is near instant and the ability to color code them helps you easily discern which one you’d like to work with. By using Kiwi’s default new message global command[1], you can compose a new email quickly from any account, anywhere in the OS which I found extremely convenient.
Kiwi can be set as your default mail app for the entire OS which is helpful when you are using share sheets within other areas of Mac OS X or when clicking on an email address in your contacts. If you rely on Google Drive as your cloud storage or like Google’s calendar interface, Kiwi can break out a Drive and Calendar instance into a separate window.
The control of notifications goes well beyond Chrome’s menu bar option. Each account can choose between all, important mail or no notifications and if you are feeling overwhelmed by all of your mailboxes, Kiwi allows you to activate a do-not-disturb mode via the menu bar that they call The Zen Switch.
Did I mention it was fast?
I have been impressed with the speed and reliability of Kiwi. At no point did I feel it was getting sluggish and more importantly, I closely monitored its CPU and RAM usage via Activity Monitor and was happy to see that it did not strain my machines resources.
Kiwi for Gmail is a very polished and impressive 1.0 application. Power users may be turned off by its simplicity, but hopefully Zive can cater to them soon. The company has already announced plans to incorporate Gmail plugins into Kiwi and I’d love to see them figure out a way to include features like snoozing mail which is becoming popular in the mobile space and a part of many people’s workflow.
If you pre-ordered Kiwi for Gmail before launch or was a part of their Kickstarter, the app only set you back five bucks. That is an absolute steal. For those just learning about Kiwi now, the app full-price only costs ten dollars in the App Store and I’d recommend buying it for any Gmail user still using the service in the browser. The Kiwi experience is a better experience.
