Peter Cohen's Comments:
Andrew Wilson
Desktop Wars is easily my favorite, and hey, this is just my background as the Macworld games guy shining through. I think it’s a fun idea with some great potential, and goodness knows that original ideas are few and far between in the game world these days. Some people (like me) have really messy desktops — it’d be fun to see some opening animation where the desktop armies sweep in with a “shock and awe” campaign barraging your desktop with B-2 bombs or something else to clear the way for the conflagration that follows. Also, how about the individual soldiers or units “retreating” to folders or other nested directories on the desktop? I know the idea is to make it passive, but I’m wondering if there’s some element to it where the contents of your desktop can be used to sway the outcome of the battle one way or the other. For example, in RTS games, where opposing teams have to manipulate raw resources to create new units.
Richard Whitelock
Whistler is a darn cool idea. I’m with some of the digg commenters that implementation is going to be very tricky, and I really don’t think that this is going to let a completely tone-deaf buffoon like me start conducting symphonies, but if it helps composers get a leg up on something they’re noodling with or gives them a way to “write down” a ditty in their head they wake up with in the middle of the night, then great. The interface has me a bit worried, though — it’s looking mighty involved already — I thiink it ought to be greatly simplified.
Michael Yuan
One feature I’d like to see in Cookbook’s meal planner: Calorie and carb counting or calculation. As a diabetic it’s important for me to keep track of such things, and it’d be really great to have an application where I could say “I’d like to prepare a meal with this value,” and have it come up with a list of possibilities — this for a salad, this for an entree, this for dessert.
Farzad Sadjadi
Sorry if I missed something, but is it possible for Portal to tap into .Mac syncing somehow? One thing I have a real need for is the ability to automate the synchronization of individual folders and files between all of the Macs I use with iSync and .Mac right now. That’s even more important to me than Bonjour support.
Kevin Capizzi
I think Hijack is an awesome idea. I spend my day trolling or contributing in about half a dozen different forums and would love something that would make that process easier. The main problems I have now is that the features and capabilities of each forum software are different — some I can use HTML, others I need to use BBcode to format text and URLs. Some offer better tracking for threads or collections of messages posted since my last visit than others. Something that helps consolidate and manage that process of reading and contributing has significant value. I’m not totally sold on the mockups I’ve seen, but the concept is a winner.
Peter Cohen
MacworldMacworld senior editor Peter Cohen covers news and the game beat for the magazine and its Web site. He's been using Macs since 1986 and writing about them since 1994. Peter came on board with Macworld in 1999. Prior to that, he worked in IT.