I’m really pleased with the feedback from the judges (yes, even Wil’s). I was going to just provide some quick replies to a couple that might make it easier for voters to make an informed decision (working on my pundit skills).
First was the last comment from Jason:
“Finally, something that was very compelling to me in the early GC mockups that seems to have disappeared is having functionality on the portion of GC that’s initially visible to the user, and NOT just on the sheet that slides out. For example, when you view GC in its default configuration, you should immediately be able to see how many emails you have unread, what today’s date is and whether there are any appointments pending, and so on. Clicking any of those modules should then provide more detail.”
I’m wondering if you might have referred to a mockup view that had a minimized version of the modules (that was a possibly confusing exploration of what to do to with a plethora of modules), because I haven’t taken that feature out but on the contrary, if this idea goes further, I would like to explore in more detail some of those quick visual info feedback issues such as Mail and iChat.
The second is from Wil Shipley:
“I’m always leery when people say, “It’s like this free app that bundles with the system, but done right!” (c.f. OmniWeb) How would I program Ground Control? Is it compatible with Dashboard? Who is the target market? People who love widgets so much that they *have* to have them on their main screen? If you actually came up with a clearly better innovation here, Apple would just copy it and you’d end up with no market again. Writing this kind of software is a quick way to stay poor.
I actually agree with Simon, er Wil here. But I guess that’s the chance you take. IMAO, Apple has dropped the ball and needs to be challenged in this dept. while there’s at least a window of opportunity to do it now. While it may not make the best business sense to go toe to toe with Apple, it’s not without precedence (Konfabulator / Yahoo Widgets).
Personally, I think Apple is pretty well locked into the current Dock and Dashboard models and would only be interested in changing it if someone like a Konfabulator rattled their cages. That might mean EOL for Ground Control (or not) eventually, but we would all be more productive and happy. And who knows, the other precedences are SoundJam (iTunes) and CoverFlow. ;)
