My Dream App

Design & development for Microsoft’s entertainment products, and father of the Xbox and zune media player.

this is probably the strongest candidate from a ‘demoware’ perspective — it’s fun, easy and most jetson-like. a great “hey…check out my new mac” application. i’ve seen a couple of implementations of tune/whistle-recognition technology and it immediately resonates with people — it gets them laughing and queuing up to try it. in terms of real composition though, i’m skeptical. for people that want to compose, they’re going to need to go beyond the simple interface and get into a more robust application and get into the complexity of multi-track interfaces. once there, i’m not sure how many people will want to use this as their midi controller since all of the midi and loop-based apps have gotten so much simpler. my mind immediately jumps to audio search. how cool would it be to whistle at itunes or google or spotlight for that song you keep hearing on the radio, but can’t remember the artist? regardless, i can see this being one of those apps that could create a lot of community/viral buzz and have people looking over shoulders in coffeeshops and cubes and having a good time with it

completely unecessary, yet delightful. i’m not sure how long the average user will stay engaged with it, but i guess we’ll find out once blossom is out there on macbooks everywhere. moving to the good/bad slider concept was a great simplification and i think it will come down to the implementation – ambient effects and the diversity of plant types will be key to keeping people’s interest. like atmosphere, i’m torn about having it on the desktop and as a dashboard fan, i’d probably prefer it as a widget and even possibly a screensaver (perhaps with time lapsed daily/weekly growth?). there’s some pretty cool algorithms out there in this space that will make this one fun to code and an obvious sequel feature is to build gardens with friends and track their “productivity”.

i’ve been enamored with the idea of “living desktops” to replace static wallpaper since i got tivo in ‘99 — i wonder why it’s not in more consumer products today. with the number of weather nuts out there, i’m certain there is an audience for this application. i like the unique approach to the visualization – it’s a creative departure from all of the widgets, websites and even tv news formats i’ve seen. i think the success of this app will come down to how good the ambient effects are and the diversity/customization of the compositions. some simple tricks like pan/zoom/flipping of the different layers during composition could make this feel less static. like many of the comments in the forums, i’d like a screensaver option and would prefer the different forecast favorites as widgets rather than the sidebar approach. i’d also like to see you allow people/businesses to publish their own themes. i’m waiting for the whistler/blackcomb theme – sign me up

i don’t get it. these apps have been around for years and i’ve never understood them since i see such marginal value beyond a traditional cookbook. the application is well thought through and the mock-ups illustrate most of the core scenarios – it was very easy to get a feel for the app and it is a well designed ux. i simply question the need for a cookbook application with so many cooking and recipe websites on the internet that can satisfy most of what you’re trying to do here. given that this concept made it to the finals, i could be offbase since a lot of people voted for it – perhaps i’m just too far away from the target to be objective (i can’t imagine scheduling out meals a month in advance). i did look for the one feature that would help me the most — selecting a list of stuff from my closet/fridge and pressing the “find me something more creative than pb&j with this”

like cookbook, i’m torn if this app is needed with the advent of ajax-like development models and the constant evolution of the major forum packages. however, unlike cookbook, i think there is a real unaddressed need that this app can help with. the lack of consistency in ux and features between forums is frustrating and i’m sure most users enlist several sites to keep up with their interests and topics. the idea of having one consistent ux across different threads and the ability to do cross forum search and pivots would be great. i was surprised by the number of feasibility challenges brought against this concept. aside from cookbook, i thought it had similar difficulty relative to the other finalists. i think you could take a tiered approach to tackling the scraping. 1) connecting with the top forum packages out there and enlist them to support/standardize around some tag convention, 2) create a community service that people could submit their scraped sites (a la cddb) and 3) as a last resort have the end user scrape and support a blacklist of sites which don’t work so that you don’t pollute the ui with negative/random results. my biggest concern with this app is how website owners would feel about you hijacking their sites… given the effort many of them put into theming their sites and their reliance on advertising, this could pose a real problem. while i thought the eye candy was a bit excessive, the video mockups were a great touch to help see your vision.

hardest problem chosen by the finalists. everyone agrees that storage is moving to the cloud and i suspect anyone with multiple macs is anxious for this concept to come to life. however, i’d like to have seen less intrusive ui and for it to be directly integrated with os x (e.g., finder, spotlight, backup, etc..). i did like the mock-ups and felt that the more active-ux approach could be more appropriate for collaborative projects between users in a shared online workspace. for this to be successful either as multi-desktop sync or collaboration tool, you’ll be forced to introduce versioning, rollback, conflict resolution, etc… to the application. when you do, preserve that simplicity that you established in the rest of the ux.