My Dream App

John Casasanta is the founder and chief of Inventive, maker of the popular utility, iClip. John feels that solid design is one of the most important things in creating successful apps. In his 15+ year career as a Mac developer he?s managed to rack up two Apple Design Awards and he?s hoping to land more by heading up the development teams for My Dream App.

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Portal is an idea that I never really latched on to, unfortunately. In the beginning, it seemed to be little more than eye-candy (the whole wormholes thing), but Farzad has fleshed it out over time.

The problem is that what he’s fleshed it out into just isn’t the way I’d like to see synching work. In a nutshell, I’d like it to be as simple as SuperDuper is at backing-up your computer. I’d figure that 90% people who’d need Portal would only need it to sync two computers but the UI was designed with many features that just seem to overcomplicate what should be a very simple process.

One thing that I will say about Farzad is that all throughout the competition he’s been a great contestant. He’s been very professional and has participated a lot in his blog and in the forums.

Atmosphere is an idea that I really hated. Then I took a really good look at it and my perceptions changed wildly. I honeslty don’t know if it’s something that I’d ultimately use myself, but I can definitely see how the masses would flock to this in a big way.

Moreover, Cameron really seems to get it when it comes to UI design. Here’s a quote from Cameron’s Atmosphere blog:

“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…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.”

This hits the nail square on the head when it comes to successful apps. What Atmosphere will lack in features, it’ll more than make up for in robustness. The details and subtleties are what will make this app enjoyable.

From a developer’s point of view, Atmosphere although doesn’t have any big challenges, it’d be a fun app to work on.

Michael’s a great contestant and he’s someone I’d be very happy to work with. He has a great design sensibility and he’s shown a high level of professionalism every step of the way.

The bottom line with Cookbook is that if Apple were ever to do an app along these lines, this is how they’d do it. And it seems like others are also seeing that so that’s why Cookbook’s been such a strong contender throught the whole contest.

I’m really glad Michael’s de-emphasizing Amazon integration and if Cookbook does win I’ll be pushing hard to get the feature de-emphasized to the point where it gets cut from the app as I strongly feel it’s a useless feature. And for those of you who think cutting this is wrong, let me ask just this…exactly how many times have you ordered groceries from Amazon?

I loved Blossom in the beginning, but I just became more and more lukewarm with it as the contest went on. It seems like a great idea until you really take a good look at it and try to think about exactly how it’d all work. The way it’s spec’d out right now, it seems like it’d be more of a hindrance to productivity than something that helps increase it.

I work hard enough that I just don’t want to stress out over taking a break to browse digg or watch a YouTube video. If your job is so awful that you need a virtual plant to keep you on track, then you should seriously consider a career change.

Whistler’s a strong enough idea that even though I’m not very satisfied with Richard’s UI design sensibilities, I still want to see it win.

I’m glad that he did simplify things considerably in his most recent mockups, but I still feel like the concept needs an overhaul before it could be a successful product.

From a developer’s point of view, I think that even though developing Whistler could be challenging, it would be an interesting app to work on.

I’m convinced at this point that Hijack’s doable. One common misconception among the naysayers is regarding the huge difference between screen scraping and DOM scraping.

But it’s gonna be hard to implement. I’d expect Hijack to take over a year to get done since a big part of it would be the training functionality. The training mode video looks like it’ll be a piece of cake, but it’s a gross oversimplification of how it’d really work.

Looking at it from a business point of view, I don’t see this one being a great choice. It’s going to take a ridiculous amount of time and support. And if you look at the primary target market, which is the youger crowd who generally don’t have a lot of money to throw at frivilous software purchases, it just doesn’t help Hijack’s case.

So I have to say that Hijack’s not one of the apps that i’d like to see win the contest. I will say that Kevin’s been a great contender. Even though Hijack’s not one of my favorites, I feel that Kevin would be great to work with as he’s very passionate about Hijack.

Looking at it from a developer’s point ov view, I personally don’t see it as being a desirable project to work on. Jason’s been adamantly defending Hijack for a while and he’ll likely be the one on our team to develop this if it wins. He’s never one to back away from a tough challenge so this may be right up his alley. Or maybe not…time will tell. I just hope he remembers the saying, “Be careful of what you wish for because you just might get it.”

Cookbook has gone from being an idea that I hated to one that I’d really love to see win. Michael’s shown that he’s totally into this and he continues to refine his idea.

One thing that I’m having a hard time getting past is the Amazon integration (or any store integration for that matter). I just fail to see how this would be useful to more than maybe seven people. Grocery shopping simply isn’t like book or CD buying. I could go into a 10 paragraph spiel of why this is but I’m assuming that it’s pretty obvious.

Considering the limited development resources we have to get the winning apps done, I strongly feel that shopping integration is a huge waste of resources. Just have the shopping list creation feature which would be useful to the majority of users.

Ground Control had a pretty close call last week but made it through to another round. Russell did some nifty skin designs for it which shows one of the big differences between it and Dashboard and that’s of visual consistency. Will this addition be enough to push it to the finals with all the competition intensifying?

There’s not much to be said about iGTD at this point. It’s been all smoke and mirrors so far and I’d be very surprised if it didn’t drop this round. Jeff repeatedly tried to convince everyone of it’s feasibility via the Chewbacca Defense but most failed to buy into it.

I don’t really have much to say about Hijack mainly because I don’t regularly go to a lot of forums. Don’t take this as me being negative toward it…I think for the people who do, it’s a great concept.

The reason I’m commenting here this week is because of Austin’s comment. Reminiscent of how George Bush has repeatadly tried to convince us of the US’s justification for preemptive war, Jason spent the past several weeks trying to convince us of the feasibility of Hijack. So I found it pretty funny that Austin comes in this week and basically shoots it all down.

But the one big difference between Jason’s argument and Bush’s is that I actually believe Jason.

Last week I commented that Whistler has too much complexity and I’ve been asked to go into more detail about why I feel this way. Whistler’s target audience is non-musicians…that’s it. In the mockup there are several “power-user” controls that have little or no meaning to people without formal music education. Furthermore, the feature list is pretty bloated as it is now.

I think with razor-sharp focus and removal of much of the featuritis, Whistler can be a fantastic product. But Richard needs to take a step back and concentrate on his core users first. One of the quickest ways to failure is trying to please everyone.

Ahhh, Desktop Wars…the bane of my existence. This needs to die ASAP.

I’ve worked in the games indiustry for several years and I can tell you that there’s no way a small development team like ours will be able to pull this off in a reasonable time, considering what the original idea’s morphed into now.

Vote for this one only if you’re the kind of person that like being served up a big box of disappointment on Christmas.

Blossom’s a great concept but also one of the more risky ones from a marketing standpoint. If it wins it’ll either be a big hit or a big flop. A lot depends on the execution of course, but comparing this with something like Cookbook, it’s not the kind of app that you can immediately “get”.

It’s ranking pretty high in the voting results but Dan’s going to have to do something remarkable soon to push it into the top 3.

Ground Control’s still my favorite entry. It’s too bad that it took the “WTF o’ the Week™” for this round. Kevin came out with an amazing video mockup for Hijack, and I was hoping for big responses from other leading contestants. So how did Russell respond?? In true conservative fashion, he did so by…selling T-Shirts!?

So Ground Control still has my support and I’m hoping that it’s built-up enough momentum from last week to stick around until the next round. I have faith that Russell will get back on track soon and continue to refine his idea and pimp it out like he did last round.

Jeff’s been struggling with iGTD. It had huge support early on but it’s slipping away because the idea hasn’t been refined much. People are wondering what it is and how it’ll help get you organized and Jefff simpoly hasn’t been able to provide much to get more voters behind him. I’m expecting another drop in the rankings for iGTD for this week.

I love the idea, but I’m afraid that Richard’s latest mockup just seems overly complex considering what Whistler’s supposed to do for users. I hope this makes this week’s cut and that Richard puts a lot of effort in refining it so that it’s a tool that people with little to no formal music theory knowledge can have fun with.

This idea is definitely growing on me. I didn’t like it much at first because I was stuck on the the idea of using it to buy groceries through Amazon or whatever. I still dislike the buying groceries thing, but getting past that small part of it, you can see that this is turning out to be a fantastic application. Moreover, Michael has proven to be a great contributor and I strongly feel that he’d be a great person to work with if he won. He’s shown that he has great vision and has some innovative ideas regarding UI design. I hope Micheal and Cookbook go far in the competition.

In round 1, I commented on how Ground Control is my favorite entry so far. This hasn’t changed one bit and Russell’s shown that he’s totally into this and also that he’s a true professional. He’s actually created a pretty slick website for Ground Control…how dedicated is that?? There’s no doubt that this;ll be a tough one to pull off if it wins, both in implementation and in marketing, but I strongly feel that it’s very doable. I’m really hoping Ground Control makes it to the end as I’d love to be involved with creating it.

Mickey proved himself to be a pretty poor sportsman after round 1 voting was over. I still like the iVlog concept (in fact, I was the one to push to make it a finalist originally), but there’s really no way I’d want to work with Mickey after seeing how he escalated things.

The sooner this idea is eliminated, the happier I’ll be. As Mickey told another contestent after he was eliminated in round 1, I’m hoping to tell Mickey, “enjoy your iPod” shortly.

This one’s top candidate for the “WTF Award”. It started off as Andrew Wilson’s idea then the past few days, someone named “Pixel Sage” seemed to take over things in the forums and turned it into a cartoony Command & Conquer with little to none of the original “icons & desktop” concepts.

Um…it’d be nice if James actually participated a bit in this beyond his original idea. I know that he’s on vacation right now, but I just don’t see him being a good person to work with if he were to become a winner.

I like this idea but the name really has to go. All I can think of is Ambrosia’s Bubble Trouble when this one comes up.

I expect this one to go far in the competition mainly because the Mac is seriously lacking a killer GTD solution and the GTD crowd is a pretty vocal (almost cultish) one.

Can it go all the way to the top 3? I think it has a chance if the concept evolves enough so that it’s understood by the masses who haven’t gotten bitten by the GTD bug yet.

The possibilities are endless here. And that’s one of the issues with Desktop Wars. There’s no doubt that this would be hugely popular if it was done well, but doing it well is 99% of the uh, battle.

It’s a feasible concept but it could take a year or two of development to really pull-off. All I know is that I’d pay anything to see the AppZapper icon going head to head with the Yojimbo icon.

Savant Carde has to possibility to be revolutionary…but the big problem is that the concept isn’t graspable at all yet.

If this makes it past the first round, Bob really needs to make the transition from vague and abstract to clear and concrete for this to have any chance in hell of becoming a winner. And quickly!

I feel that this one’s gonna go pretty far in the contest. It’s a concept that people seem to be gravitating toward like moths to a flame. It’ll definitely have the eye-candy factor going for it.

My gripe with Herald is that it’s just not an app that I’d use myself. There are tons of RSS readers available and they do the job just fine. I just don’t see people taking the time to set this up as much as it would need to be if it were to be really useful. And as for the printing part, well…save a tree people!