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.