My Dream App

Joshua Keay lives in New York City, where he's a product designer, though everything he designs winds up looking like a toy. He started Monkey Business Labs with some friends shortly before Tiger came out, and he's been making widgets ever since. He's a stickler for beautiful, simple objects, though he's not above using superfluous visual effects in his own work, as long as it makes people smile. You can check out his portfolio at JoshuaKeay.com and at Monkey Business Labs.

Cookbook is a nice idea for an app, I could certainly see myself downloading it and installing it. That said, I think going with straight aqua just isn’t enough for this app. One idea that occurs to me is that you could go with a paper-themed aesthetic, or come up with great icons for the different ingredients or primary ingredients. Something like the instrument panel in GarageBand at the bottom, where you click off a few ingredients that you have and it will start to narrow down the recipes you can cook. Gorgeous food photos could make this app a lot more interesting.

So, I’d add a few more custom controls that fit within the Aqua universe but are still unique to your app. That’s part of the fun of designing these things!

Lovely screenshots, though I’m concerned about the technology behind it. I think that the logistics of making it screenscraping based would be pretty tricky, which means that to make this work you’d need to have it be more WebKit centric, which means that the actual threads would look a lot like the original message board, rather than this.

Gorgeous interface! I like the icon designs a lot. Perhaps you could introduce a second color for emphasis? Right now it all looks like it’s greyscale, by introducing a slight bluish shade it turns into Graphite or silver, which makes it even sexier! I really like the glow effect around the letter G. Perhaps that could wind up elsewhere in the interface?

There’s always room for more apps within this space, though I think that it’s important to remember that visuals are a great way to distinguish yourself from your competitors. As others have said, this is a crowded space and there are plenty of others who are already looking pretty snazzy. I think it’s interesting to go with a completely different aesthetic like this, the black background could be really sexy, though you have to push it further. As it stands right now, it looks like a webpage. Why not make it look like an Apple Pro app, like Aperture? That’d be pretty hot!

Now, perhaps I’m a bit biased, as a rather widget centric guy, though I just don’t see the advantage of this over using the Dashboard. I think the way that widgets disappear when you’re not working with them is their biggest advantage - the last thing I need is a second dock to clutter up my screen! That said, you’ve made this rather pretty looking. There’s a caveat though! All your screenshots show this semi-transparent appearance, which is really sexy when you put it over a photograph or a nice desktop picture, though looks terrible when you have it over text or a web browsing window, in addition to being very hard to read… And of course everyone would want to theme this and add their own modules.

Beautiful illustrations, though what’s great about this idea is that it’s quite extensible with add on theme packs. Another thought, I’d like to be able to have the sun phases being drawn over my own desktop pictures, maybe with some rain being drawn on top of that as well. That mix and match quality allows for all sorts of experimentation on the users behalf. Another thought - you should check out DeskShade, a great little app that does similar things. Jan at MacRabbit got the interface right on it, it’s a great extension of Apple’s Desktop Pictures implementation.

Neat concept, though I think the biggest challenge you will face is making something that looks great on screen that is quite readable. Paper works in a different way than pixels. Also, there are plenty of little things that work on paper that don’t work on screen. In your mockup, having the type be justified on both the left side and the right side means that you get some awful wordspacing issues that really interfere with legibility. Tofu is a great little app that manages to get this right. I think your best bet would be to design a better way of reading text onscreen than adhering too closely to the newspaper metaphor, which is cute at first though could quickly get tiresome. That said, I’m a fullscreen fanatic - when I’m reading, all I want to see is the content. If you created an app that did that well, perhaps using a safari plugin where I could find an article and press a button and instantly I’m browsing it cleanly like this, I’d be a happy camper!

This is a solid idea, but it’ll all come down to the implementation. First, I think you’ll really need to simplify that control panel even more, make it easy as pie to learn. Then, you need to throw in lots of customizations to the actual plant. Really, it doesn’t have to be a plant at all. It could be a skyscraper that is being built. There are tons of great illustrators out there, all they’d need to do is construct a linear series of progress images. Our Picture Framer widget ships with ten different frames, this should come with at least as many. Also, it’s a great angle for shareware - give away two themes, only the paid version supports other themes. Lastly, you should support hue shifting, because I might want five flowers growing on my desktop for different things, one red, one yellow, etc.

I think coming up with a new metaphor that isn’t sticky notes would help push this further in the ranks than it has been. Technical implementation issues aside, there are plenty of times when I would not want a giant sticky to be in my folder. I’d need a nice way of shrinking it down to be less obtrusive, then perhaps letting me roll over it to get the details.