Jon Hicks's Comments:
Cameron Westland
Next favourite was Atmosphere. This is what the Mac platform is rightly known for - Eye Candy! I would love to have realistic, dynamic starscapes as my desktop. I particularly enjoyed the details on the environment sliders. To lessen distraction, it would be good to see an option to control the speed at which transitions in the image happen. Generally, this sort of thing is, I think, better served as a screensaver, where you will actually see it, rather than as a desktop where it will be covered by a mass of windows. So an option to display as both desktop and screensaver would be great. That said, this isn’t something that I feel I would pay a lot of money for.
Michael Yuan
This is the kind of application that would make me do something I wasn’t doing before, just so I could use the tasty interface. Delicious Library had that feel about it, and so does this. I fell for the level of detail and thought that’s gone into this. The way the notes field is differentiated but not too attention-grabbing. Everything was laid out in such an intuitive way - I knew that I could use this without wondering where to find a certain function. I saw that there was a share function, but didn’t see any information on how this worked. I would expect sharing over Bonjour, which would work similiar to iTunes and iPhoto shared libraries, but how about by email? If recipe cards could be developed to some kind of open standard (http://microformats.org/wiki/recipe-examples) so much the better.
The meal planning/grocery list idea was well executed, even though this felt too regimented for me to use in real life.
Dan Lundmark
This was by far my favourite idea of all, and the one that I would want to use personally. The fact that the mockup showed time spent in Safari, and on what sites struck an immediate chord with me. Knowing where my time went, and being able to identify where time is being sucked away on non-work activities. Its not always obvious where that time goes, and this would spell it out without having to manually record time.
Combine that with the impetus to make something grow like a work fuelled Tamagotchi, and this a real winner. My only criticism is that I found the ‘initial set up’ window a little confusing at first, whereas everything else was instantly obvious. This is a minor niggle however, as may only need an explanatory title (”How much should you be using this? for example) to make it crystal clear.
The detail I would like to see, that wasn’t covered by the mockups would be how easy it is to switch profiles. Presumably this would to be automatic, based on time, but if you were, for example, working in an evening, how you could remember to switch profile? It needs to use as little thought as possible for it to work. Anyway, I want this app!
Jon Hicks
Hicks Design