Most people on the site are talking about feature sets and how this feature and that feature are cool. From what I can see my app is a little bit different than the rest.
It’s not:
- helping you be more productive
- helping you create content
- answering all your questions
- aggregating your content
While all of these things are certainly useful and marketable I think a more specific focus is necessary for a truly great shareware app. So I tried to think about exactly what kind of shareware apps people are making for OSX. Let’s take a look at some of them briefly. For the record, I am not comparing my idea to any of these in any way except for the fact that they focus on very specific ideas.
App Zapper
Wow I love this little App. What does it do? One thing, one very specific thing and it does it very well. You drag an application to its window, it finds references to that file and magically BZZZT! zaps the files away with a flash of the screen.
iClip lite
I don’t have the full version of this app yet, but I do have and love iClip lite, it deserved the apple design award for sure. This simple little app just holds your clippings in a very easy to use and self-explanatory interface. Even without using any standard widgets the app gives you very strong visual queues that will have you mastering it in seconds.
Textmate
I know this App is very complex. I use it every day for my work, and its quite amazing. However, take a look at its interface, even the preference panel is very simple and slimmed down. Textmates focus is on user-created extensibility. That one feature (called “bundles”) is basically what sets Textmate apart from other applications. One feature!
Ok so I know you’re saying
These apps are productivity apps, you just said Atmosphere wasn’t like any of those! Well thats true, but it’s useful to use these as a reference when looking at successful shareware apps. Some things they have in common:
- Beautiful user interfaces
- Deliberately reduced feature sets
- Very specific focus
Can we talk about Atmosphere yet?
Ok fine! So now we know some of the key ingredients into making a potentially good shareware application. Lets map them to Atmosphere.
Beautiful user interfaces
This one will be the most tricky, the most fun, and the thing that will seal the deal for Atmosphere. I don’t want to get into too much detail right now. On the blog one of the things that I want to do is post each day a different weather condition and try to describe it in detail. Suffice it to say. This app is going to be gorgeous. Here is a quick list of types of weather that could potentially be described visually with Atmosphere:
- Clear
- Cloudy
- Partly Cloudy
- Partly Sunny
- Sunny
- Mostly Sunny
- Hazy
- Windy
- Fog
- Hot and Humid
- Very Hot
- Chance of Rain
- Rain
- Thunderstorms
- Scattered Showers
- Drizzle
- Rain Showers
- Freezing rain
- Light Snow
- Chance of Snow
- Snow
- Chance of Snow
- Flurries
- Sleet
- Snow Showers
Thats right, there is a LOT of weather conditions out there. And like I said, each day I will try to cover another condition and describe it in detail. Thats the key in my opinion, to a sleek and professional app, the little details.
Deliberately reduced feature sets
Features features features! We all know that people love to ram a lot of features into their applications. I do however realize that there is no way to please everyone, and I’d rather have an 80% market than a 100% market with feature bloat any day of the week.
So why don’t we break down our features into a nice little list (i like lists!)
- Visually shows the weather overlaid over your background on the desktop
- Includes some sort of forecasting (I don’t want to dump my brain on this one just yet, but let me say one thing….Spaces)
- Some way to randomly generate weather for those poor folks in San Diego and other boring weather places.
Those are the main features, but there are a few sub features i’d like to have but I am still mulling them over. Remember these are not in for sure yet, just ideas to talk about!
- Macbook sensor integration (Turn your laptop and the rain drops in a different direction)
- Rain/snow accumulation indicator, some way to show how much it has rained or is going to rain by having water/snow accumulate at the bottom of the screen
- Window integration: water pours down the screen hitting the window and spilling off the edges and trickling down until its another window, moving the window will cause the raindrops to react realistically and slide off the window.
Very specific focus
Visually shows the weather, thats it! Even though there are hundreds, possibly thousands of ideas that you could add in an application like this, ultimately the purpose is to show you the weather at a glance, without being too annoying or gimmicky.
Phew, that’s all for today folks!
