Jason Snell's Comments:
Richard Whitelock
I’ve been waiting for this product since, well, forever. There are a lot of us who have musical ideas in our heads but simply haven’t been trained in an instrument that will let it escape into the world! GarageBand supplies a great canvas for amateurs with tunes locked in their heads — Whistler provides the missing link for the instrument-compromised. Excellent!
Dan Lundmark
This app runs the risk of becoming a Tamagotchi — battery drained, dusty and forgotten at the bottom of my Applications folder. And yet I find it amazingly compelling. The thing that makes Blossom work for me is that it’s not meant to be a game you play — it’s meant to just react to what you do on your Mac during the day. It’s eye candy, it’s a productivity enhancer, and it’s even an opportunity for great artists to sell add-on packs!
Kevin Capizzi
Consider me among the disbelievers. First, I’m not sure there’s really a strong need for this app. But more importantly, I just don’t believe it would ever work reliably, and it’d be a bear to keep it up to date. (I realize that Jason Harris says it’ll work, but I’m just not convinced that it can be made to work and be a good user experience and be maintainable by a development team.) If the makers of forum software packages adhered to some sort of standard for publishing their data, that would be one thing. I’d love to be proven wrong, but right now I think this is a disaster waiting to happen.
Michael Yuan
Back in the mid-’90s I used Upstill Software’s Mangia! recipe manager a whole bunch. Every few years I search for a good replacement, and come away disappointed by the collection of dull FileMaker databases that litter the landscape. So the first time I saw Cookbook, I was sold. I want — nay, I need an iApp for recipe management and storage! Let me make one big feature suggestion: Each recipe needs to include a record of every time you made a particular recipe, who ate it, and what went right (or wrong). And one feature of Mangia’s that I really enjoyed was the ability to browse by certain recipe types — the equivalent of Smart Recipe Collections? I’m a little less sold on the necessity of Amazon.com integration. Won’t most people prefer to patronize their local markets and buy fresh ingredients?
Andrew Wilson
I used to be a huge fan of “desktop diversions,” as they were called back in the day. Remember UnderWare, the screen saver for your desktop? Loved, loved, loved it. And so when I first saw Desktop Wars, I got a huge hit of nostalgia. That said, I’m just not a big fan of Desktop Wars. It seems impractical, gimmicky… I’d almost rather have it as a screen saver, or modify the concept to be something else: a battle between the files you leave on your desktop or in your hard drive where winners are chosen, or a racing game that uses the files on your desktop to construct a race track, or… something else. Maybe the model should be those old Tabletop Football games, where you’d stick a bunch of football players on the field and then turn on a device that vibrated the entire playing field? There’s something here, but I worry that it’s just not focused enough and that the killer idea hasn’t bubbled to the top yet.
Jason Snell
MacworldJason Snell is Vice President and Editorial Director of Macworld. He's been writing about the Mac, in print and on the Web, for more than a decade.