My Dream App - Cameron Westland

So there you have it folks.

2006-10-25T23:36:13Z

Thanks for everyone who voted for Atmosphere! It is terribly flattering.

I need sleep now, my stomach is in knots from that insane last round.

Introducing forecasting, and a revisted preferences panel.

2006-10-20T16:09:04Z

The images are self explanatory. I will answer any questions in the forum. Click the links for larger versions.

So everyone else is making a website...

2006-10-12T17:32:45Z

I might as well join the many. Let me know what you think :D

Vote for Atmosphere!!

Collaborative Community Settings Panel

2006-10-12T09:02:45Z

After posting the original settings panel, the community went back and forth with multiple suggestions from Jason Harris & Many other active forum members to come up these two very well done versions:

I think these are pretty awesome. Thanks to ckohler and Shadowknight for these two different versions. Ok community let me know what you like and dislike about the two different preferences sections.

Also…Timeline and Forecasting integration screenshots are coming very shortly. This is a key aspect of Astmosphere and I think you will all like what you see. Stay tuned!

Settings panels explored

2006-10-06T11:59:25Z

Here are some mockups for some of the settings panels. I’d like some feedback on them, I figure a simple set of options from within system preferences is the best way to go. Click for full size versions. Thanks to CajunLuke for the coding these up in Interface Builder and sending me the source!

Wow

2006-10-05T17:41:41Z

Over 1300 Diggs Thanks everyone, you boosted me up out of being eliminated to sitting comfortably at fourth place.

Expect some important updates tonight. (still at work!)

Atmosphere Explained

2006-10-05T11:21:35Z

Click to enlarge:

Stay tuned for more updates. Vote me out of elimination!

A gift from a very talented designer.

2006-09-24T03:35:48Z

Hi everyone. Round one is over. phew, can you believe it! Ok now let’s get serious about Atmosphere. My friend Kai Goldmann has spent many hours on these and I’d like to share them with you all. These are not final by any means. Just a taste to get your mouth watering. Remember these are concepts, not final, the features are going to be discussed further, I cannot stress it enough. Feedback is welcome as always!

I hope you like some of these images as much as I do. Kai is so very talented at what he does!

I’m sure these are going to raise a lot of questions. So you know what? I’m not going to answer anything. Lets hear what the community has to say first and then I will post a follow-up entry and we’ll hash some stuff out.

Good evening, the temperature is 28 degrees and it's partly cloudy.

2006-09-22T19:39:31Z

Clouds are drifting by gently and your Blossom is showing strong growth; You’re being very productive this month.

And the voting begings.

2006-09-21T10:18:21Z

I’d like to talk about some of the comments that judges have left me.

Wil Shipley said:

In the end, this is a solution looking for a problem. If I want to know what the weather is like outside, I just look up from my monitor for a moment. I can’t see spending months of my life trying to make that more efficient.

That is probably the biggest critism to this sort of application. However to look at the marketability of finding out the weather I polled some of the most popular weather websites on the Internet. Let’s see how they ranked (Using Alexa.com for rankings):

bbc.co.uk/weather - 23
cnn.com/weather - 32
weather.com - 114
wwwa.accuweather.com - 623
theweathernetwork.com - 2,442

So while I agree with what Allan says:

I don’t want my computer to reflect the weather when it is overcast, or for all those dark winter months.

You can’t deny the market for such an app. Its not just about the current weather. Its also about weather forecasting. I don’t want to just give away 100% of the ideas in the first voting round but one of the features that I did talk about was forecasting.

This week I will provide more concepts and ideas for different weather types. But I will also expand on what I think is an important aspect of Atmosphere. Forecasting.

Drizzle

2006-09-18T21:32:47Z

The pictures help explain it better than I could. Think of a frosted pain of glass over top of your wallpaper with raindrops on it, its not pouring out but its getting there!

So lets talk about Atmosphere

2006-09-15T16:28:39Z

Most people on the site are talking about feature sets and how this feature and that feature are cool. From what I can see my app is a little bit different than the rest.

It’s not:

helping you be more productive
helping you create content
answering all your questions
aggregating your content

While all of these things are certainly useful and marketable I think a more specific focus is necessary for a truly great shareware app. So I tried to think about exactly what kind of shareware apps people are making for OSX. Let’s take a look at some of them briefly. For the record, I am not comparing my idea to any of these in any way except for the fact that they focus on very specific ideas.

App Zapper

Wow I love this little App. What does it do? One thing, one very specific thing and it does it very well. You drag an application to its window, it finds references to that file and magically BZZZT! zaps the files away with a flash of the screen.

iClip lite

I don’t have the full version of this app yet, but I do have and love iClip lite, it deserved the apple design award for sure. This simple little app just holds your clippings in a very easy to use and self-explanatory interface. Even without using any standard widgets the app gives you very strong visual queues that will have you mastering it in seconds.

Textmate

I know this App is very complex. I use it every day for my work, and its quite amazing. However, take a look at its interface, even the preference panel is very simple and slimmed down. Textmates focus is on user-created extensibility. That one feature (called “bundles”) is basically what sets Textmate apart from other applications. One feature!

Ok so I know you’re saying

These apps are productivity apps, you just said Atmosphere wasn’t like any of those! Well thats true, but it’s useful to use these as a reference when looking at successful shareware apps. Some things they have in common:

Beautiful user interfaces
Deliberately reduced feature sets
Very specific focus

Can we talk about Atmosphere yet?

Ok fine! So now we know some of the key ingredients into making a potentially good shareware application. Lets map them to Atmosphere.

Beautiful user interfaces

This one will be the most tricky, the most fun, and the thing that will seal the deal for Atmosphere. I don’t want to get into too much detail right now. On the blog one of the things that I want to do is post each day a different weather condition and try to describe it in detail. Suffice it to say. This app is going to be gorgeous. Here is a quick list of types of weather that could potentially be described visually with Atmosphere:

Clear
Cloudy
Partly Cloudy
Partly Sunny
Sunny
Mostly Sunny
Hazy
Windy
Fog
Hot and Humid
Very Hot
Chance of Rain
Rain
Thunderstorms
Scattered Showers
Drizzle
Rain Showers
Freezing rain
Light Snow
Chance of Snow
Snow
Chance of Snow
Flurries
Sleet
Snow Showers

Thats right, there is a LOT of weather conditions out there. And like I said, each day I will try to cover another condition and describe it in detail. Thats the key in my opinion, to a sleek and professional app, the little details.

Deliberately reduced feature sets

Features features features! We all know that people love to ram a lot of features into their applications. I do however realize that there is no way to please everyone, and I’d rather have an 80% market than a 100% market with feature bloat any day of the week.

So why don’t we break down our features into a nice little list (i like lists!)

Visually shows the weather overlaid over your background on the desktop
Includes some sort of forecasting (I don’t want to dump my brain on this one just yet, but let me say one thing….Spaces)
Some way to randomly generate weather for those poor folks in San Diego and other boring weather places.

Those are the main features, but there are a few sub features i’d like to have but I am still mulling them over. Remember these are not in for sure yet, just ideas to talk about!

Macbook sensor integration (Turn your laptop and the rain drops in a different direction)
Rain/snow accumulation indicator, some way to show how much it has rained or is going to rain by having water/snow accumulate at the bottom of the screen
Window integration: water pours down the screen hitting the window and spilling off the edges and trickling down until its another window, moving the window will cause the raindrops to react realistically and slide off the window.

Very specific focus

Visually shows the weather, thats it! Even though there are hundreds, possibly thousands of ideas that you could add in an application like this, ultimately the purpose is to show you the weather at a glance, without being too annoying or gimmicky.

Phew, that’s all for today folks!

This is exciting

2006-09-14T20:32:26Z

Ok when i saw this site at first, i was really excited, I read Phil’s blog daily and I really like all of the apps that these judges make they are good stuff for sure.

My dream app “its raining” is being renamed from here on out to simply “Atmosphere”

Basically i check the weather networks a lot. I use the dashboard weather widget a lot. So why not have something more fun? More visual. Everyone has seen the effects that happen when you drop a widget on your dashboard, lets utilize these effects!

Basically the weather is a simple app that starts when you start your computer, the desktop is your interface and you can configure it through system preferences. You set your city and zip code and maybe the frequency of checks to a number of weather sources. As it polls the weather website you will visually see the updates on your desktop.

Its raining? You see raindrops splashing against your wallpaper.

Its snowing? You see snowflakes gently gliding down your screen.

Overcast? A light haze of clouds settle over your desktop

Starry night? Full moon? You’ll see it just by glancing at your desktop.

I am a web developer and I design user interfaces for a living so its kind of ironic that my dream app basically has no direct interface.

There are currently a lot of great submissions and I know this is going to be a great competition so lets have a lot of fun and work on developing these ideas into some awesome apps!