My Dream App

Piotr Gajos, this crazy bastard, is a full-time student and full-time UI graphic designer, which leaves him approximately -10 hours to sleep. He's been so busy since winning the Apple Design Award for iClip lite 2 widget, that some people actually saw him drinking pure aircraft fuel and cursing Apple for bringing this much frenzy into his life. When he has a chance, he enjoys searching for brutal and unusual music, watching "Friends" and reading books by Japanese authors. Occasional Quake 3 business session isn't out of the question as well.

This app fills a very weird niche - I’d call it a metaproductivity tool. While it’s purpose and projected functionality are awesome, I have reservations to the interface. First of all buttons - there are four styles of them in the mockup. This doesn’t improve neither consistency nor looks. I would limit them to maximum two styles. Second - iTunes-like scrollbar. It’s just my personal opinion but I find new iTunes UI elements simply horrible. I’d go for standard Aqua scrollbars, at least until Leopard is released. Third: app logo looks completely out of place. Again personal, aesthetic opinion - it looks bad. Horizontal glow put on each letter, yellow outer glow and blurred, squished reflection… It might be a good idea, a starting point but it sure needs a lot of work.

I just want to write two things about this idea - congratulations and oh my God does it look sweet! Whistler introduces a completely new way of interfacing with sound editing apps, which is so intuitive and simply human, that I’m actually astonished that I’ve never heard about it before. Interface needs some planning and polishing - top area is a little bit unclear to me (except the wave visualiser in the background, it’s amazing!), it would require opening Help and reading what is going on there. I believe it can be resolved - simplified and streamlined to be even more intuitive. Also those five icons aren’t top-notch but I’m sure that if this app gets executed, they will be improved. Also I think it might look better if both main window and options sheet had the same width. Integrate them and you get a nice, flowing, dark panel.

This is my favorite idea among contestants. It grabbed my attention with two things: it’s purpose and it looks. I spend a lot of time (which I will never get back) at forums, and an application which puts all my favorite places in one interface is something that’s missing from my Apps folder. Mockups which Kevin has shown so far are very impressive. Everything seems to be very well thought out, logically connected and the overall looks…I admit that I’m a sucker for slick, plastic/metallic stuff with desaturated colors and darker areas which boost the overall contrast. CSS support sounds like a killer feature which will attract many people as most Mac users care about aesthetics of their desktops. Front Row-like interface which I saw in motion looks great too although I’m not sure about usability here - I for one would never sit back on my couch to read posts. Forums are for communication, not only reading after all. Although if Hijack introduces a way to write posts with wireless keyboard on my lap, I’m all for it. Nevertheless I’m in a deep love with this concept and I hope it will win.

I’ve had a really hard time understanding what’s going on with the hype about this idea. Needless to say I don’t like it but I have no idea why people are so excited about concept which has been available in Linux and Windows for years. Also it has so many features that I’m afraid it might become a resource hog. I prefer smaller apps, precisely designed for one-two purposes. It’s very difficult to polish your product and maintain it’s usability if it does so much. Ground Control tries to tie so many apps and functions within one interface, that it looks like an attempt to build a user interface above user interface provided by the operating system. Not meta-UI, but a redundant repetition of what you already have in OS X.

Plus this huge, blue horizontal bar taking up space reserved for dock really reminds me of Windows. Maybe if it looked different, was less obtrusive, it would grow on me. At this point I can’t think of a way to improve it. In my opinion it needs a radical change of approach, maybe even paradigm shift - to something which rather remains hidden and pops up when needed, than something that takes up precious screen space and steals focus from what you actually should be doing.