Here's what I mean...
Lots of people don't need Conjure.
Lots of people probably need it, but wouldn't use it.
Some people download Conjure, find it distasteful, and leave. That's okay with me. I don't want these people as customers. Frankly, I'd prefer it if these people were my competitor's customers.
Some people try Conjure, find it intriguing, but find that it generally is not as good as what they came up with, and send me pictures of what they came up with. I like these people well enough, and I do take all suggestions to heart, it's just that they tend to show me pictures of something *I* wouldn't use.
Then there are a few people who buy it. They saw it, looked past the (various) website(s), past the explanation, past the movies, and saw into the soul of the machine. Something was there. It connected with them. These are the people I made Conjure for, and they're the ones I'll be building it for, going forward.
I could try to make this change the world. I could spend years analyzing and reanalyzing my users' habits, non-users' habits, and general Conjure concepts. But I think I'd come up empty. What I want to do with it is very different than what it is now, and after talking to some of my most ardent supporters, I think it's time to change things up a bit more.
So version 2.5 will no longer refer to Conjure as an alternate Desktop environment. And I really don't want to call it a personal organizer, or a project manager. I don't know what to call it yet, but I think these concepts suck.
There's a better explanation out there.
-Chilton
2 comments:
Heh - well, you are certainly a developer with a focus! I find Conjure very interesting, but I don't grok it completely yet. A Mac user since System 6.0.1 (and no stranger to the various Windows flavours), it's hard to break old habits.
Confession: one of the nicest things I've found so far in Conjure is "clusters" (which remind a lot of the "stacks" concept that we all thought would be introduced in some flavour of OS X's Finder). My first thought was: I want this in Finder! I realize, of course, that this would go against your intent - parcelling out Conjure is probably not something you'd be interested in doing.
(I also thought the same about "clothesline") :)
I'm going to keep playing with this, and try to wrap my neurons around it. We'll see where it goes...
Cheers - and congrats on a very interesting and well-implemented UI.
I first tried Conjure yesterday. I worked on it all the day and today I buyed it. What can I say? It is the most amazing app that I saw in years; I never tried something like this. Okay, at the very beginning you need to force yourself out of your habits (and this is good, anyway!) and look the whole thing from a new point of view...what is really impressing me is that with Conjure even collecting and organizing data for a project it's a true creative process by itself! So, thanks a lot for this magic and hope that the project will have a long, bright future!
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