Forget The Finder, Dock, Or Spaces. Conjure Different

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What’s in a Name?

Before diving into the details, I admit to being thrown off a little by the name Conjure. It’s sounds magical, mystical, mysterious. Does it fit?

con•jure
verb
1 |ˈkänjər; ˈkən-| [ trans. ] make (something) appear unexpectedly or seemingly from nowhere as if by magic : Anne conjured up a most delicious homemade stew.
• call (an image) to mind : she had forgotten how to conjure up the image of her mother’s face.
• (of a word, sound, smell, etc.) cause someone to feel or think of (something) : one scent can conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake.
• call upon (a spirit or ghost) to appear, by means of a magic ritual : they hoped to conjure up the spirit of their dead friend.
2 |kənˈjoŏr| [ trans. ] archaic implore (someone) to do something.

Again, the target user for Conjure will probably just understand.

Organizers & Knife

Conjure lets you organize items by selecting them and using the Organizer tool. It’s a non-structured object; a simple menu option which holds whatever you’ve selected in the object, and you can have many of them (and probably will).

The Knife function lets you slice up items to be saved by the Organizer tool. Slice images, web pages, movies, whatever. Then select what you slice, and hold them in another Organizer object.

Clutter & Clusters

One issue all Mac users face at one time or another is clutter. We save more than we organize. Discipline is a requirement for organization, but left brain people do it differently than right brain people.

Conjure’s Clusters is a little like a 3-D shoe box. Grab whatever is on the desktop at the moment, drag them into a Cluster for safekeeping. Click the Cluster and everything inside expands so you can see what’s there.

See? I told you Conjure thinks different. Write. Draw. Organize. Save.

Sink, Surface, Focus

I believe that multitasking is a myth, that focus is more important for getting things done. Yet our Macs have a lot going on all the time. Browsing, email, chat, Twitter, word processing, music, all on screen at the same time is not focus.

Conjure has a Focus mode which lets you work on only one thing, while everything else goes away, including Conjure. It Sinks, and gets out of the way. Want it back? Tell Conjure to Surface.

And I always thought creative people were unfocused.

Links & Spaces

We know what a web page link looks like and what happens when we click it. In Conjure, a link can be created between one object and another.

This way you can create visual hierarchies, mind maps, information trees, organizational charts, even flow charts. It’s all done right on your whole screen. But that’s not all.

Conjure works a bit like a digital canvas and you use it to manipulate tools to get things done. But it also lets you create multiple desktops, uh, canvases, in a way similar to OS X’s Spaces. But you can switch canvasses without using or switching Spaces. Complicated, no?

A Fertile Future

If Conjure is all so complicated, then why bother? Because seeing is believing, and, because things change. You need to see how Conjure works, because it may be pointing to how we use our Macs in the not so distant future.

Once you see a Conjure video and then imagine an oversized iPod touch in your hand, the fabled Mac 10-inch multitouch screen iTablet cum iPad, you’ll understand. Instead of using a keyboard and mouse, the future of Macs may be somewhat more like digital finger painting on a multitouch screen.

Conjure is ready made for the future that hasn’t arrived. Yet.