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Round 4 - Selected Judge Comments 
Kevin Rose (digg) - Tech Media:
Very cool idea - although I’d simplify it a bit. I’d also love to see this applied my to-do list. The more tasks I complete, the healthier my plant.
Martin Ott (SubEthaEdit) - Development Team:
I’m starting to like this idea. It’s focused and unique and just needs a few details fleshed out. Are there some heuristics which could atomically categorize documents you work on as “good” or “bad” for your plant. You can specify apps of course but sometimes you need to distinguish on the document level but without listing each and every document. Is the plant visualized on the desktop and if so how could it be done without getting in the way with all my items on the desktop? But generally speaking I think it’s a cool idea and it should be implemented.
Jason Snell (Macworld) - Tech Media:
This app runs the risk of becoming a Tamagotchi — battery drained, dusty and forgotten at the bottom of my Applications folder. And yet I find it amazingly compelling. The thing that makes Blossom work for me is that it’s not meant to be a game you play — it’s meant to just react to what you do on your Mac during the day. It’s eye candy, it’s a productivity enhancer, and it’s even an opportunity for great artists to sell add-on packs!
Jason Harris (ShapeShifter/Chicken of the VNC) - Development Team:
Feedback is an interesting thing.
Diets trade long-term positive feedback (I look hawt!) for short-term negative feedback (tastes good, want now!!!). That’s why they’re hard.
Blossom doesn’t involve any trades - it’s long-term positive feedback (better productivity) and short-term positive feedback (the plant that I’ve become emotionally attached to grew a new flower).
This is, in a peapod, why I like Blossom.
Leo Laporte (This Week in Tech) - Tech Media:
I like this idea. It’s just innovative and quirky enough to capture the imagination of Mac users. Blossom offers a positive feedback loop that will help users be more productive without coercion. The trick is going to be to make it easy for users to configure their parameters. It has to be simple, yet effective or the whole idea fails. But if you get it working put me down for a copy.
David Pogue (New York Times) - Tech Media:
Man, this one takes me back. Remember the old System 7 days? Interaction with your actual desktop was the hot idea of the day. Googly Eyes used to follow your cursor…Talking Moose would make fun of you when it detected idleness…After Dark’s Lawnmower Man screensaver would mow the pixels off your screen, one row at a time. This one has a little bit of the Tamagotchi/Pet Rock thing happening, with just enough Aquarium simulator.
You *do* plan to offer a choice of different plants, don’t you?
Anyway, this one’s my favorite seed of an idea; I hope it takes root. I’ll bet that if it blossomed, it would flower on the world’s Mac desktops like creeping ivy.
Round 3 - Judge Comments
David Lanham (Iconfactory) - Designers:
I’d buy this in a second if I could get a freaky organic plant on my desktop. It’d be the epitome of functional eye-candy. Would also be awesome if there was some way to create a few petal, leaf, and branch styles and let the app generate the plant off of those, then the customizing junkies (like myself) would really jump on board.
Martin Ott (SubEthaEdit) - Development Team:
This is a truly unique idea setting it apart from the rest of the finalists. At first I thought this is weird but consider how this simple idea of a growing plant could motivate you and help you achieving your goals. The idea is focused and the first mock-ups are very promising. A very simple interface for setting up the rules and that’s basically what you need. The possibilities of a design for growing plants are plentiful. It’s definitely another favorite on my list particularly because of its unique character.
Bill Bart (The Skins Factory) - Designers:
A really really neat idea… beyond the plant, this is the sort of thing where the interface should be dead-simple, like screensaver simple (how’s that for input!). Either that or something completely over the top like the KPT Fractal surfing interfaces of old. Behavior-wise, I think it would be amazing if it were possible to ensure that no two plants looked alike by using random seeds and a genetic evolution as previously suggested. I’d also like to see the plant from an almost top-down but 3D perspective shooting runners randomly out across the desktop rather than just sitting in a pot. I would also hope that some sort of continuous sense of life be given to the plant through subtle cycling movement or something. Unfortunately, it does seem like the sort of app that could lose its novelty rather quickly if it’s birthed half-baked and isn’t mind-blowingly cool from the get go. Still, a very original and inspiring idea if done properly.
Jason Harris (ShapeShifter/Chicken of the VNC) - Development Team:
I want this, badly. I think I’ve said something about it every round, and I’m not going to stop - Blossom rules. Increasing productivity by associating it with a nurturing instinct is just flat-out brilliant.
Adam Betts (Art of Adam Betts) - Designers:
This is the most original idea I’ve read here but it’d be quite interesting to see how developer will pull this complex plant growth/death simulation trick.
Maya ThumbThere used to be a screensaver for Mac OS X way back in year 2000 that simulates plant/tree growth called Maya Paint Effects Screen Saver X (still available at Versiontracker )
I’m not sure if developer is able to extract anything useful out of that screensaver but it showed that it’s possible to do detailed plant/tree using paint algorithm.
Several UI challenges you’re going to have to figure out is where exactly to place the plant on the desktop and how big it will be. It’s either out of your sight or in-your-face.
Austin Sarner (AppZapper) - Development Team:
Blossom is a neat idea. I have to say that I was unsure of how easy it would be to define what productivity means to you, but the latest mockup proved me otherwise. If it is really that straightforward to tell Blossom what to qualify as work and what to qualify as goof off or play time, then I have no doubts about the cool factor of having a plant grow.
Gedeon Maheux (Iconfactory) - Designers:
By far, the most creative idea in the contest. A sort of fauna chia-pet Tomagachi for the masses! I agree with other judge’s comments that it would have to be extremely realistic and visualized in 3D for it to really work. There would have to be a way to “minimize” it so you could keep an eye on it while you work, but also peek in on it from time to time and make sure your efforts were really helping out.
The quandary comes in when the Blossom must calculate the time you spend taking care of Blossom. Does checking in on it, looking at it, playing in the preferences, etc count as “work time” or “play time”? You’re not really being productive, you are just checking to SEE if you’ve been productive. Why do I feel like I’m stuck in a temporal loop now???
Josh Keay (Monkey Business Labs) - Designers:
This is a solid idea, but it’ll all come down to the implementation. First, I think you’ll really need to simplify that control panel even more, make it easy as pie to learn. Then, you need to throw in lots of customizations to the actual plant. Really, it doesn’t have to be a plant at all. It could be a skyscraper that is being built. There are tons of great illustrators out there, all they’d need to do is construct a linear series of progress images. Our Picture Framer widget ships with ten different frames, this should come with at least as many. Also, it’s a great angle for shareware - give away two themes, only the paid version supports other themes. Lastly, you should support hue shifting, because I might want five flowers growing on my desktop for different things, one red, one yellow, etc.
Round 2 - Judge Comments
Dan Hendley (Mac Cubed) - Bloggers:
At first I didn’t really like this idea. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought I might actually use it. I remember when I used the Chia Pet widget in dashboard. Every day I would excitedly open the dashboard to see if it’s grown any and I would water it. Heck, I’d even stop in several times a day to water it just to be sure I didn’t forget earlier or to make sure it registered my click from earlier, etc. When I forgot to water it one weekend and saw it upside dead on that dreadful Monday morning, I was devastated. What had I done to my poor chia pet??
This suspension of disbelief could keep me using the app for a while, I think. My only concern is being able to tell it what programs are considered healthy and which are considered procrastination apps. For example, a typical workday for me involves using a Jabber chatroom and browsing (and typing in) multiple tabs in multiple windows of Firefox. These 2 primary tools for me would equal imminent death for my poor plant since I *have* to use them to do my job. Other than that, it could be intriguing. Once I begin goofing off (maybe you could set specific urls to be considered bad, such as youtube, google video, facebook, etc), perhaps I could audibly hear my plant slowly being wilting, recovering, etc.
Scott McNulty (The Unofficial Apple Weblog) - Bloggers:
Another way to turn my Mac into an ambient device, and I like it. I’m not sure if I would actually use this application (I’m a master of ‘Not Getting Things Done’) but the idea is very cool. I can imagine people getting into the idea of trying to make their blooms better than their co-workers because in the end it is all about being better than someone else.
Merlin Mann (43 Folders) - Bloggers:
I like the idea of trying to visualize boring columnar data in unusual, ambient ways. Another approach, that’s a bit more ambitious (similar to multiple plants as you describe), might be to portray a _garden_, where the different areas (tomatoes, daisies, loco weed, whatever) reflect the health of different areas of your life. If you play to much WoW, the rose bushes representing your relationship with your spouse turns brown, etc. :)
Having said that, this would be a bitch to pull off — tools and their usage are not inherent markers of anything but tool usagee. So, for myself, I’m unsure how, e.g., email usage would fit into this. Ideally my plant would flourish based on _dispensing_ emails efficiently — and having my plant penalized for a day where I got a lot off my plate would suck. Promising idea, though.
Paul Stamatiou (PaulStamatiou.com) - Bloggers:
Dan, you’ve captivated me with your UI concept. A fun app idea with a great fill of eye candy. I would finally be able to see how much time I spend in various apps everyday. It’s a truly original idea with a phenomenal featureset and has never been done before. I’m rooting (lol) for ya!
Oliver Breidenbach (O?Reilly Mac DevCenter Blog) - Bloggers:
A very original idea. Is there anything like scientific research that this could be based upon?
John Gruber (Daring Fireball) - Bloggers:
This is the best idea in the whole batch: it’s feasible, it would be useful, it might be fun, and people might actually buy it. I can’t say those things about any other idea.
You really need to concentrate on making it as easy, quick, and obvious as possible to configure goals and rules. If it’s too complicated, or if it takes too many clicks to make adjustments, then people aren’t going to actually use it, even if they want to. An anti-procrastination tool or system can’t feel like work itself; if it does, people will procrastinate to avoid the tool or system.
The whole point is to get you to concentrate on the things you want to be concentrating on; Blossom needs to be a motivator, not a distraction in and of itself. Make it as simple as you possibly can. Ask yourself how Apple would do this — think about the options and preferences that they would remove just to make it simpler and more obvious. (Another good thing about your idea is that this is the sort of app that Apple would never actually do themselves — but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t think about how they would do it if they did.)
Round 1 - Judge Comments
Cabel Sasser (Panic) - Developers:
I’m always thinking about clever ways to solve the problem of work procrastination. I’m one of these guys who will accomplish a task on my to-do list, then immediately take a reward of ten minutes of stupid web browsing, like a mouse eating a piece of e-cheese. Thus, I think this idea is really quite clever — if I know I’m going to be killing a beautiful flower on my desktop by arguing about video games on the internets for twenty minutes, I honestly (honestly!) might think twice about it and go back to work. It’s a great way to try to exercise on-task self-control in a fun way — without resorting to, you know, firewalls or electric shock therapy. I’m not entirely sure it would be a huge seller, because it’s really not the kind of thing anyone wants to admit to paying for. But, if it was cheap and cheerful enough, it could find an audience.
If I may, I’d like to see the plant be 3D via OpenGL, so you could easily rotate it and set an angle that looks best, with a nice shadow underneath it so it really looks like it is sitting on your desktop. Maybe add a way to publish your plant status — iChat picture? Web page? — so your friends can ridicule you when your plant dies after 2 days. And what if you can fully customize and trade plants with friends? Don’t forget to include a couple super-cute, cartoon-styled plants, for kids, Japan, and me.
Wil Shipley (Delicious Library) - Developers:
This is a neat idea. While it may be tricky to specify what it means to be “actively” using an app (do you have to be typing? how does the program detect this?), I think it’s worth exploring.
Nicholas Jitkoff (Quicksilver) - Developers:
Staying productive seems to be all the rage on the internet nowadays, between the countless apps that organize your information and the life hacking techniques being invented. These do you very little good if, like me, you are easily distracted and regularly hijacked by an interesting news link. While the idea behind Blossom seems a little cutesy, the ability to visualize your efficiency could lead to some interesting revelations and, more importantly, better awareness of your activities. It may take a little time to get used to it, but Blossom could certainly help people stay on track.
David Watanabe (Acquisition/NewsFire) - Developers:
Weird enough to be great. That’s all I can say.
Gus Mueller (VoodooPad) - Developers:
Wow, I really like this idea, and I can’t think of anything else out there like it. Nothing is cooler than an untapped area for programmers to explore.
Where I think Blossom would take root (haha) would be in the UI obviously. There’s so much room for neat ways to get the point across that you’re not living up to your own standards. Wilting, flowers, little bees could pollinate across plants. Can I get this on my desktop like Konfabulator? What about if I’m _really_ productive one day? Can I get little nitrogen tablets to use at a later date when I’m feeling lazy? And the programmer in me says “this is reasonable, go for it”. I say go for this one.
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