Ground Control vs. the Dashboard
If cars were designed like Macs,
the dashboard would be in the trunk
What's up with that? Ground Control is a true dashboard
environment. Unobtrusive, yet always instantly accessible.
Commonly used information and resources are a simple
keystroke or mouseclick away. Like a real dashboard,
all you need are quick glances at speed, gas, etc.,
likewise, Ground Control provides a smooth, seamless
workflow experience that will increase your productivity
and allow you to work with less distraction and interruption
of the creative process.
Continuing the real dashboard metaphor, Ground Control
is to your workflow productivity what a dashboard to
a car truly is. Can you imagine driving down the freeway
at 85 mph (OK, 65--whatever) and hitting the equivalent
of F12 and your whole windshield goes 50% darker and
all of your "vital" information (like weather reports,
tire pressure, windshield wiper fluid levels, iPod controller,
seat adjustments, etc.) come up in pretty widgets? While
all those things are important and you need access to
them at the right time, while you're barreling down
the freeway (at 65 of course!) is not the right time.
While not quite as life-threatening, Apple's Dashboard
as a productivity enhancer is as counter-productive
as rummaging through your glove box looking for the
driver's manual while you're driving (65).
Likewise, when you regularly work with many open apps,
to keep on launching small but necessary apps or keeping
those apps open all the time can be a difficult task
to manage when you have to do simple things like look
up a phone number, a calendar item, a To Do list or
just do a quick little calculation. Sure, we have Exposé
to help sort through windows and soon, OS X 10.5's Places
to better manage our work environments, and those with
large budgets can afford to buy 30" Apple Cinema Displays
or have dual-monitors just to be able to show commonly
accessed apps like iChat and iCal while they're working
on their projects. We wouldn't have to do that, if we
had a better, quicker, less obtrusive way of accessing
common, everyday information and resources. OK, so we
still all need dual 30" Cinema Displays — just
for other things than iCal and iChat.
Workflow Benefits
All of these are hinderances to productivity. To stop
and launch Address Book just to get an address or phone
number; to send a quick email; review incoming email
without actually having to open or go into Mail; or
even worse, to hit F12 and go into Dashboard mode —
while I'm there originally to use iClip Lite, I check
the weather, stocks, Dilbert, etc. — all, when
I have a deadline to meet. I just needed to access the
clipboard. Of course, these may reflect other personality
issues, but if I had Ground Control, I could continue
in a state of denial much longer. Ground Control will
allow you to quickly access your info and then, just
as quickly, allow you resume your workflow.
Apple used to have an online G5 productivity calculator
(maybe they still have a MacPro version of it) where
you could drop in the amount of time you estimated you
waited for your computer to process tasks throughout
the day and entered your hourly[, billable rate and
they calculated by the amount of time the G5 would save
on your daily grind how quick it would pay for itself.
You could think of Ground Control in a similar fashion
(with the exception that it would pay for itself before
the demo version even expired). Ground Control will
streamline your working environment to free you up to
be more productive. This is music to the ears of anyone
who bills by the hour, and the Mac platform has a large
percentage of just that type of user.
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