John Casasanta —
Development Team
...Ground Control isn't without
it's obstacles but my gut feeling is that it will
have much more of a longevity factor than Dashboard.
I'm confident that this will go pretty far throughout
the elimination rounds so I'll be saving more
of my commentary on it for later rounds. I will
say that it has the potential to improve productivity
in a way that Quicksilver has, but possibly in
a more significant way. The bottom line here is
that even though it'll continuously be compared
to the Dashboard, Ground Control isn't about fun,
it's about streamlining your workflow. As of now,
this one is my personal favorite of the
bunch.
Jason Harris —
Development Team
...What’s challenging about
GC is that each individual module would be moderately
challenging to write on its own. Putting them
all together, the task becomes pretty formidable.
But the idea’s compelling enough that it’s
probably worthwhile.
Something I’d really like
to see in GC is a unified skin system. I definitely
see skins being popular for something like this,
but doing it correctly would take some thought.
Basically, I envision the skin designer basically
creating a CSS stylesheet for various text types
(app name, section header, explanatory text, etc.).
The skin designer would also provide graphics
for panel backgrounds, buttons, checkboxes, etc.
Finally, the skin designer would provide a set
of Core Image filters that would be applied to
application icons. This would allow, for example,
the Mail.app icon to appear nicely monotone and
desaturated, blending with the GC background.
With a skin system like this, I
think the modules could just use standard Cocoa
widgets and the underlying engine would theme
‘em appropriately.
Martin Ott —
Development Team
When I first read the idea I thought
it was kind of lame. After looking at the mock-ups
I thought differently. It blends functions of
the Dock and major Dashboard widgets together
for really easy access to your calender, mail
and what not. The aggregated information is really
at your fingertips. The Dock status icons usually
only feature some kind of badge giving you a hint
that something is going on, but with Ground Control
you get more. The suggested plug-in architecture
is very important for customizing it for the users
needs and also for being open for new kind of
apps. It’s also great for releasing a 1.0
version with just the basic set of plug-in, e.g.
mail, calender, and weather. Then it can be extended
in future versions with new plug-ins and functionality.
You can also create a community around it for
providing plug-ins. What worries me is the fact
that it is more or less yet another Dashboard-widget-aggregation
kind of app. But Ground Control seems
to make it right.
Austin Sarner —
Development Team
Sounds like Dashboard done
right to me. Reminds me a bit of Statoo
from Panic, and this could be a slick app with
a decent module community behind it.
Wil Shipley —
Developers
I’m always leery when people
say, “It’s like this free app that
bundles with the system, but done right!”
(c.f. OmniWeb) How would I program Ground Control?
Is it compatible with Dashboard? Who is the target
market? People who love widgets so much that they
*have* to have them on their main screen? If you
actually came up with a clearly better innovation
here, Apple would just copy it and you’d
end up with no market again. Writing this kind
of software is a quick way to stay poor.
Aaah, Wil doesn't know
what he's talking about ;-) Actually he does,
but Apple will never "copy" it unless
it's done first. And there's always the hope that
Apple might reach into their pocketbooks and buy
it rather than copy it. Right now, I think they
have too much vested into the current Dock and
Dashboard concepts and it would be admitting that
they might have been wrong. Kind of like the one-button
mouse. I still think no one at Apple has told
Steve that it now has multiple buttons—that's
why it's designed to look like it only has one. |
