The official BitTorrent client is a great place to start as it has all the tools you need for downloading torrents. The app imposes no limits on data size or the number of files you download, plus.
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Having an email client installed on your Mac can make a huge difference for your productivity. After all, your web browser is a portal to distraction, and any time you boot up Chrome or Safari to check on your inbox you’re in danger of losing at least 10–15 minutes to reading the news, browsing Facebook, or going down a “wiki-spiral.”
That said, not every email client is built the same. While macOS comes with the Apple Mail app by default, it might not necessarily be the best fit for your needs.
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Best Email Apps For Mac 2020
So what’s the best email app for Mac then? Depends on what you do. You might be a power user, comfortable with running macros to make the most out of your email experience, or you might just want something that works out of the box without having to fuss with settings. Security could be your top priority if you work with sensitive materials, or you might just need to easily manage multiple accounts.
Whatever the case, there are a few things to keep in mind when evaluating all email clients: How fast is the setup process? How easy is it to use? Is it secure? What are the sorting options for your inbox? Is it nice to look at?
Let’s sift through some top email apps using this questioning framework.
Apple Mail: Best email client for Mac by default
What makes Apple products great is also what limits them: because Apple needs to make apps that are so easy to use that anyone can use them, much of what they produce is quite basic in functionality. Which is fine — just make sure you know what you’re getting with the Apple Mail app.
You definitely get clean, user-friendly design that’s in line with all the other Apple software. In addition, you get outstanding integration with macOS and iOS, including the use of the Notification Center and the ability to send emails via the Share function in other apps.
https://clevernj949.weebly.com/blog/best-mac-maintenance-apps. Although adding multiple email providers, including iCloud and Gmail, is easy — there have been some bug reports around using Microsoft accounts, such as Hotmail or Live. Maybe the old Apple and Microsoft feud is not over yet?
In step with the times, Apple Mail app makes it effortless to add emoji to your emails from the shortcut bar right in the composing email window.
Honestly, for most people, the Apple Mail app will absolutely be enough. However, if you’re the kind of person who has a lot going on in their inbox, there are not too many ways to filter through all the messages quickly and pin down important conversations, or simply delete unwanted mail.
What’s great:
Not so great:
Mozilla Thunderbird: Best free email client for Mac power users
Perhaps most widely known for their web browser, Firefox, Mozilla’s other major product is their email client, Thunderbird. Hailed as the best free email app on the market at various points throughout its long history, where does Thunderbird stand in 2020?
Unfortunately, Thunderbird’s design shows its age. Blocky and utilitarian, it’s quite a bit uglier than most modern email clients. But look below the surface and you’ll discover some very handy features.
For one, you have the option of tagging emails as they come in. Just add tags like Personal, Work, and ToDo and suddenly conversations become much easier to find later on. Even better, create your own tags to make the classification system as specific as you need it to be.
Thunderbird features an integrated calendar and chat client, both of which are indispensable for work, and boasts great privacy features — like not automatically displaying images (hence stopping pixel trackers) when you open emails (can be changed in Preferences).
Overall, Thunderbird has some powerful value propositions, but is also a bit ugly and unintuitive. So, if the looks don’t bother you, give it a try. Otherwise, you’re better off using another option.
What’s great:
Not so great: Mac electron apps slow.
Kiwi for Gmail: Best Gmail app for Mac
If you don’t use Gmail, you can skip this one: Kiwi isn’t for you.
But for all other Gmail for Mac users, Kiwi for Gmail is an excellent Mac mail option. A desktop app with the look and feel of your browser email inbox, Kiwi features the ability to combine multiple accounts and filter your inbox with Focus to organize correspondence by date, importance, attachments, and more.
In many ways, Kiwi is Gmail’s missing ingredient, making the best free email provider online also the premier Gmail app for Mac. What’s even more exciting is that Kiwi lets you run G Suite apps like Google Docs and Sheets outside of your browser. Being able to leave Chrome or Safari behind and get some focused work done alone makes Kiwi worth the install.
What’s great:
Not so great:
Spark: Best Mac email client for a clean inbox
A relatively new email client for Mac, Spark is based on an intriguing premise: What if your inbox was able to sort itself out based on your priorities but without your input?
Spark’s Smart Inbox algorithms are able to instantly identify whether an email is personal, work-related, or just a newsletter you signed up for years ago because it gave you a coupon but have since completely forgotten about. This kind of artificial intelligence works so well that Apple gave Spark an Editor’s Choice Award a few years ago.
In its quest for widespread adoption, Spark doubles down on usability, offering quick, one-click replies with generated text based on how you typically respond to emails and powerful automatic functions to clean up your inbox in seconds. Besides, the app is beautifully designed and very easy to use.
Of course, for Spark to have all of these powerful features, complete access to the content of your emails is required — which might raise some privacy-minded eyebrows. However, a lot of people would be happy to offer that in return for ease of use. So, if this notion doesn’t bother you, Spark might well be the best free email app for Mac.
What’s great:
Not so great:
Canary Mail: Best security in an email client for Mac
New to the Mac email client game, Canary Mail’s outstanding list of features still makes it a worthy contender.
Canary Mail prioritizes security and privacy, providing every email you send with end-to-end encryption, so that if your data is ever intercepted it can’t be read. Even better, you don’t have to change any settings to do this — everything is set up right out of the box.
Add to that a fantastic design and some excellent filtering options, such as natural language search, smart tags, algorithmic bulk cleaner, and intelligent typography enhancements, and Canary Mail might well be the best email app for Mac, period.
What’s great:
Unibox: Most innovative email client for Mac
The most exciting thing about Unibox is how it fundamentally changes the way you see your inbox. Instead of organizing everything by date received or subject, Unibox structures every conversation around contacts. That way your inbox resembles your text messages or messaging app, making everything intuitive and easy to navigate.
The developers of Unibox worked hard on making their email client for Mac the easiest to use on the market — and it shows. The design is stunning and you can easily respond to any email in the same window, get previews of attachments right there, and just scroll to remind yourself of all the conversations you’ve had with that person.
What’s great:
Best of all, Canary Mail and Unibox are both available for a free seven-day trial through Setapp, a subscription platform with over 150 top Mac apps chosen to make your day more productive and fun. Now can’t you wait to go back to emails already?
Setapp lives on Mac and iOS. Please come back from another device.
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Table of Contents
In this tutorial, we’ll be learning and creating RESTful APIs with Flask. To follow along with this tutorial, you should already have a good grasp of Python, Flask, and SQLAlchemy.
Since the application we’re going to build in this article is an extension of the one we built earlier in the Flask SQLAlchemy Tutorial, make sure you’ve already read that post and have the code available for our API additions!
What is an API?
API is one of those technical terms that gets thrown around a lot in the programming world. We hear about people creating applications using Uber APIs or Google Map APIs. For example, I created a job search application using Twitter’s API. But what exactly is an API, and why is it so important?
API stands for Application Programming Interface, and it refers to the mode of communication between any two software applications. An API is just a medium that lets two entities of code talk to each other.
Have you ever implemented Google Maps in your application or have seen an app that makes use of Google Maps? That’s the Google Maps API.
Watch this tutorial to see the Twitter API in action:
Companies like Google and Facebook, among many others, have APIs that allow external applications to use their functionalities without exposing their codebase to the world. There’s a high chance that an organization you want to work with already has an API in place – both for developers and end users.
But why do companies allow us to use their content via APIs? By allowing users access to their content, businesses add value for developers and users alike. Instead of building a new functionality from scratch and re-inventing the wheel, developers can use existing APIs and focus on their primary objectives. This practice actually helps organizations by building relationships with developers and growing their user base.
Now that we have a grasp on APIs, let’s talk about REST.
What is REST?
Like API, REST is an acronym, and it stands of Representational State Transfer. It’s an architectural style for designing standards between computers, making it easier for systems to communicate with each other. In simpler terms, REST is a set of rules developers follow when they create APIs. A system is called RESTful when it adheres to these constraints.
To better understand RESTful APIs, we need to define what the terms “client” and the “resource” mean.
Client: A client can refer to either a developer or software application which uses the API. When you are implementing the Google Maps API in your application, you are accessing resources via the API, which makes you a client. Similarly, a web browser can also be a client.
Resource: A resource describes an object, data, or piece of information that you may need to store or send to other services. For example, the location coordinates you receive when you work with Google Maps API are a resource.
So, when a client sends a request to the server, it receives access to a resource. But what language do clients and servers use?
For humans to speak to each other, we have proper syntax and grammar. Without them, it’s impossible to understand what’s being communicated. Similarly, APIs have a set of rules for machines to communicate with each other that are called Protocols.
HTTP and requests
HTTP is one of the protocols that allows you to fetch resources. It is the basis of any data transfer on the Web and a client-server protocol. RESTful APIs almost always rely on HTTP.
When we are working with RESTful APIs, a client will send an HTTP request, and the server will respond with the HTTP response. Let’s dig into what HTTP requests and HTTP responses entail.
When an HTTP request is sent to the server, it usually contains the following:
The header consists of an HTTP verb, URI and an HTTP version number which is collectively called a request line.
In the above example,
GET is an HTTP verb, home.html is a URI where we want to get the data from, and HTTP/1.1 refers to the HTTP version.
GET isn’t the only HTTP verb out there, so let’s look at some of the other HTTP verbs commonly used.
When a server receives the request, it sends a message back to the client. If the requests are successful, it returns the data requested else it will return the error.
When an HTTP response is sent back to the client, it usually contains the following:
This time, the header contains the HTTP version, status code, and reason phrase that explains the status code in the plain language.
Have you ever seen an error 404 Not Found? That’s one of the status codes where 404 is a status code followed by the reason phrase.
There are many codes sent between the server and the client. Some of the common ones are as follows:
Luckily, Flask’s implementation takes care of most of this for us on its own, but it’s still useful to know about response codes in order to get the most from API responses.
Creating the API with Flask
This post is a part of Kite’s new series on Python. You can check out the code from this and other posts on our GitHub repository.
As a standalone application, our books database is helpful, but we’ve now realized we want to allow an online book rating service to access our library. Also, we’d like for our online flashcards to be automatically tagged with books, instead of entering book details manually.
As our library grows, our developer followers may be interested in seeing our list, or adding new suggested books. An API with Flask is just the thing.
Let’s create some endpoints for the books database. You can think of an endpoint as the location where we access a specific API resource, and it is usually associated with a specific URL string. But before we start creating endpoints, we need to make a change in our
database_setup.py file.
Where we created our
Book table, we need to add some code that returns the object data in an easily serializable format. Serialization will turn an entry into a string format that can be passed around via HTTP.
Our new code should look like this:
In the
app.py file, we’ll add some endpoints using the @app decorator. It’s important to note that by default, @app.route has a GET method. If we want to use any other HTTP verbs, we have to specify them by passing them via the methods parameter as a list.
We created two functions
booksFunction and bookFunctionId(id) . Our first function evaluates whether the request method is GET or POST. If it’s the former, it will return the get_books method. Otherwise, it will return the makeANewBook method.
The
makeANewBook() function takes in three parameters. These are the values we need to create a row in our database table.
Our second function,
bookFunctionId() , also checks for a GET request. There is a subtle difference between the GET request in booksFunction and bookFunctionId . The GET request in our first function returns all the books in our database, while the GET request in our second function only returns the filtered book.
The
bookFunctionId() function also evaluates for PUT and DELETE methods and returns updateBook() and deleteABook() , respectively.
At the top, we import
jsonify from Flask, a function that serializes the data you pass it to JSON. Data serialization converts the structured data to a format that allows sharing or storage of the data in its original structure.
Before JSON became popular, XML was widely used for open data interchange. JSON involves less overhead when parsing, so you’re more likely to see it when interacting with APIs via Python.
Here we create five different functions that execute CRUD operations. To create a new book, we insert new values in our Book table. To read the existing books from our database, we use
all() . To update a book in our database, we first find the book, update the values and add them. And lastly, to delete a book, we first find the book, and then simply call delete() and commit the change.
Kite is a plugin for PyCharm, Atom, Vim, VSCode, Sublime Text, and IntelliJ that uses machine learning to provide you with code completions in real time sorted by relevance. Start coding faster today.
Verifying endpoints with Postman
To check our endpoints, we can use Postman. Postmanis an application for testing APIs that works by sending requests to the web server and getting the responses back. We can test our endpoints via Python as well, but it’s nice to have a sleek user interface to make requests with without the hassle of writing a bunch of code just to test them out.
Once we have Postman installed, let’s start testing our endpoints. In this article, we’ll only test our
GET and POST requests.
First let’s execute our
app.py file. To check if everything is working, we’ll try a GET request. From the dropdown menu, we select GET and send a request to http://localhost:4996/booksApi. You should see something like the following image:
In order to test our
POST request, we’ll select POST from the dropdown menu. We then update our values using the key value forms provided. As you’re typing in the updated values, notice how our URL updates automatically.
Once we have updated the value, we will hit send again – and voila! We have successfully added a new Book. You can check this by sending a
GET request again, and your new book should be in the list.
Conclusion
We just created a Flask web application that provides REST APIs for our books tracker application. As you can see, writing RESTful APIs isn’t hard. Now you have an idea on how to write a RESTful API using Flask.
Because it’s so easy to implement, at least with Flask, you might start thinking more about how you could “API-ify” other web applications. Think about how to determine which resources an online service makes available, how to know who will be accessing the resources, and how to authenticate users and systems which request access to these resources. Further, what’s the best way for your application to pass parameters to your endpoints, and what happens when there are multiple versions of your API?
Python and Flask – optionally using SQLAlchemy to handle the database – are excellent tools to help answer these questions and more, along with the Python and Open Source communities.
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