The end of the beginning. Almost.
It’s been quite a while since Russell announced that I would be developing Ground Control. Since then, many people have been wondering what has happened to the project, especially with little news to report. During an application’s early design stages, there isn’t much that gets decided that would generate any kind of buzz. Certainly nothing that would generate the same kind of hype that, say, Cookbook’s UI designs got. But now, we’ve got some news.
Before I begin, however, I would like for all of you anxiously awaiting Tubular’s release, don’t worry. Development is not slowing down on that at all, nor will it be until well after it gets released. That having been said, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about Ground Control’s design and how it will be implemented, and that’s what we’re here to talk about. So here we go.
First, let’s get this out in the open. Ground Control will be Leopard-exclusive. I was waffling a bit on this, going back and forth, but I see very little reason to justify staying on Tiger. Leopard development, for reasons my NDA with Apple won’t let me go into, will make development much easier and faster. It also means that we don’t have to kill two birds with one stone - we don’t have to worry about making sure that Mail on both Tiger and Leopard work (which is more of an undertaking than it sounds). We’ll also be able to use CoreAnimation in Ground Control, which will give us a lot of freedom to create the kind of UIs that we want to do.
Rest assured, however, that we haven’t lost focus. Ground Control is not meant to be a very visual application. We’re still targeting this application at power users, and so the kind of visual effects we do will not be distracting or terribly invasive. Think subtlety; in and out fades, throbbing glows, etc.
Second, we’re going to be working very hard to secure 3rd party developers of Mac apps to provide plugins for Ground Control. Right now, the list of developers we’ve got is pretty short, but at the same time we’re still just in the design s. Here’s who we’ve got so far:
- John Casasanta - iClip
- Austin Sarner - AppZapper
- Jason Harris - ShapeShifter
- Dustin MacDonald - Wallet
And this is just the list of people who have committed to writing one. We are and will be pursuing several others over the next couple of months. We completely understand how important 3rd party modules are going to be for the success and the utility of Ground Control, and we’re going to make it as easy as possible for other developers to produce some awesome modules for their apps. And as the My Dream App apps come together, we’ll work with the developers to try and turn them into modules - it’s only fitting.
Finally, we’ve got something like a schedule for the GC development (albeit without dates). There will be 6 milestones in the project, culminating in the 1.0. It’ll work something like this:
- Milestone 1: Mail module (unskinned)
- Milestone 2: iCal, Address Book, and iTunes modules (unskinned)
- Milestone 3: iPhoto, Calculator, Application Launcher modules (unskinned)
- Milestone 4: Skins
- Milestone 5: Activity Monitor, iChat/Adium modules
- Milestone 6: 1.0
This isn’t set in stone, and will probably change quite a bit during development, but that’s where we’re headed right now. We’ll be posting updates as they happen, and as we reach the different milestones, but we probably won’t be doing anything in terms of a beta (at least not for awhile).
This is just the beginning. Ground Control was born from a great idea, and got refined a lot during the competition. To that end, we’ll be asking for a ton of feedback from you guys on all sorts of stuff. We really want to gauge what everybody hates, loves, and craves about Ground Control. Keep your eyes on the Ground Control forums and blog, as well as on the My Dream App forums, as we’ll be asking you guys about ideas we’ve got.
The biggest two tools people associate with productivity on Mac are Growl and Quicksilver. We want on that list.
No commentsWhat Exactly is Apple’s “Active Desktop”?
Well, it’s been a little more than a slow-news day — more like a slow-news year as far as GC is concerned — but this seemed as good a reason as any to make a new GC post.
While I had seen and read the news flashes regarding Apple’s Active Desktop patent on quite a few news sites before this, this one caught my eye on MacOSRumors’ homepage:
MacOsRumors — “…Apple has applied for a patent on an “Active Desktop” style feature for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard — basically, incorporating motion/animation, widget-style information displays, or the use of screensavers as a moving desktop (something that can currently be done with third party software)…”
Up until reading this, all I had seen about Active Desktop was that it was primarily going to be something along the lines of MyDreamApp’s “Atmosphere” — which even Jason Harris observed was “disturbing” — referring to a link to an AppleInsider forum topic describing Apple’s patent. After reading through that too, it might be a bit of a stretch, but along with the more obvious parallels to Atmosphere, there could be the possibility of incorporating something along the lines of Ground Control using this same technology.
AppleInsider — “…Aside from the time of the day, a variety of other types of events may be used to effect a change to the desktop picture. “For example,” Apple continued. “the desktop picture may change upon a user event, such as launching a predetermined application. For instance, a particular desktop picture may be computed when the application iTunes.RTM. is launched; a different desktop picture may be computed when the application QuickTime.RTM. Player is launched.”
…”
I’d love to hear some other thoughts on this development. TBH, while I’m not convinced that Apple is rolling Ground Control-like features into Leopard (although I would be worried for Atmosphere), I wouldn’t be too disappointed if they did. Leopard’s October release will roll around a lot sooner than I’m afraid even the best hopes for Ground Control to be developed will be realized.
While the AppleInsider description was more vague and it would be a stretch to read GC functionality into that, the little blurb mentioned in the MacOsRumors frontpage, “widget-style information displays” definitely piqued my curiosity and has me wondering…
No commentsGround Control Rumblings
I just wanted to write a quick post to let everyone know that while Ground Control has been slumbering (or smouldering) it has not been forgotten. In the meantime I trust many of you were being sufficiently distracted solving various heists and watching MacHeist raise a hefty amount of money for charity (oh, and offer a pretty nice bundle of apps to boot). Way to go Phil and the whole MacHeist team. You guys really outdo yourselves.
For me personally, this has been a pretty crazy, busy time since MDA finished up and I was only able to keep a cursory glance on MacHeist and pretty much the same thing for GC. But judging by the web logs, it seems that many of you keep visiting on a regular basis hoping for some new news and I wanted to give you a little something to hope for over the holidays.
Steve Streza is finishing up Tubular (the last “5% is 95% of the work” part). He is looking at a 1.0 release before Christmas and then he’ll need to work on at least a couple of point upgrades right after that to get everything running swimmingly. If you’re not already, you can keep track of Tubular at http://www.tubularapp.com/blog/.
As for Ground Control, Steve will be starting on a paper for the plugin architecture for GC hopefully over the Christmas break (I have a hard time calling it winter break). Steve’s obvious priorities right now are school and finishing up Tubular so we’re looking at late January – early February before things start really moving forward with GC.
It seems we have some pretty good support still from the MDA team and look forward to seeing some modules developed for some of the upcoming MDA apps as well a commitment from John Casasanta to develop an iClip module. I have tentatively approached some other app developers regarding module development but it is still too early to confirm other third party interest. I’m hoping once Steve has the plugin architecture articulated, we’ll be able to more agressively shop other possible development.
Look for more action in the GC Forum soon (and feel free to put in your .02¢ too). In the meantime I hope everyone has a happy holiday season and I wish everyone a Merry Christmas and look forward to touching base after the New Year.
1 commentCat’s Out of the Bag - GC Forum Announced!
Well, so much for staying “low-key” with a Ground Control Forum. John Casasanta, the Development Manager at My Dream App and of iClip fame, has let the proverbial “cat out of the bag” by submitting the forum to digg (digg it here). I have “punished” John for this “oversight” (I said in my original email that it was “low-key” for now!) by asking him to contribute to the forums which he has most penitently done. Thanks John!
Now the invitation is open to all to come and check out what’s going on in the Ground Control Forums. It seems that there is still definite interest to keep GC alive by some of the Mac programming community with some pretty impressive coding chops. What becomes of all this is still up in the air, but the GC Forum is the best place to stay on top of all things GC and help contribute to the ongoing development of Ground Control.
I was originally planning on inviting only a select few, so that we could bat around the issues of continuing development of GC apart from MDA and then after getting enough feedback, gauge the interest and decide whether to make a public announcement or not. Well, that process has been “slightly” accelerated thanks to John. In light of that, please go easy on the design of the site as I was also planning on using this period to tweak and fine-tune little things here and there. I am open to feedback, so feel free to come in and post any suggestions for improvement on the forums, and I’ll try to keep tweaking it as we go.
I will be posting major GC news updates to this blog for the RSS blast, so definitely keep the RSS feed bookmarked. Also, I will still be contributing to the MDA forums as development on the three winners proceeds. So I look forward to seeing what all comes together over the course of the next several months.
Long live Ground Control!
No commentsMDA Final Madness
I just have to say that today has been one crazy day. I’m writing this before the final results are in, so it’s still up in the air what the final outcome will be. I can’t imagine being in Kevin, Farzad and Michael’s shoes right now. Total shades of 2000 and ‘04. It really is too bad that someone has to lose and that not every idea is “pick-up-able” by other developers as was once hoped.
Where I might be wrong is the fact that three ideas are duking it out to a bloody pulp and if that doesn’t signal passionate interest to a potential developer I don’t know what would.
So far, it looks like it has been a pretty clean fight and it has been an interesting dynamic not knowing exactly who was what color. I will wait until the dust starts settling and the blood coagulating and then give some final thoughts on this round of voting. All I can say is craziness. But good craziness.
2 commentsGround Control is Dead! Long Live Ground Control!
Howdy folks. Most of you are probably coming here from the My Dream App contest site. As you’re also probably aware, Ground Control was eliminated in the semi-final round and is now out of the running. I went ahead and set up this blog to keep those that are interested in whatever happens to Ground Control abreast of the news. If there is continued interest, I am thinking about putting up a BB for users to banter back and forth and continue the development of ideas. For now, I’m playing catch-up on other projects and will be posting as time permits.
I do want to thank everyone at MDA, including Phil and the staff, the other contestants and especially the community that caught hold of the Ground Control vision. I had a blast and am honored that my idea was able to make it to #7 out of over 2700 other entries. Truly amazing.
It will be impossible for me to keep it alive without your interest and support. I look forward to see what the upcoming weeks and months have in store.
3 comments