Old-timers (like me, phaw phaw) will recognize the above phrase from video and print ads from the '90s, "What’s on your PowerBook?" Then, the question addressed data: The teacher has lesson plans, the grandfather has his life story, the salesperson has data sheets, and so forth. Now that the dust has settled around the question of whether the iPhone will allow applications written by outside developers (it does), the question has become: What apps are on your iPhone?
First off, let's look at what's already out there, a mere few weeks after the device's release. There's already quite a list at iphoneapplicationlist.com (catchy domain name, huh?), and sites such as LifeHacker and Rev2.org have their "Top 10-or-25-or-whatever" lists, featuring apps from the obvious to the, uh, less so.
Clearly, games will have a place. The good thing about a phone is that you can whip it out quickly whenever you’re bored - waiting for a bus, or whatever - and entertain yourself. Likewise, Internet communication apps. But what else?
Bare Bones Software President Rich Siegel recently said that "certain products in our line could be expressed very nicely on the iPhone." But his company tends toward geeky tools for hard-core computer users: Their flagship product, BBEdit, is justly famous for its programming tools. Somehow I'm finding it hard to imagine on the iPhone! But maybe with an attached keyboard...could a BBEdit/iPhone combination become a writer’s preferred, portable tool to take the place of AlphaSmart's products?
BBEdit on the iPhone would be better than...no word-processing capabilities.
And Bare Bones also makes Yojimbo, a sort of repository for unstructured data - a scrapbook, if you will. Would that be well-adapted to the iPhone?
Stay tuned. In the meantime, tell us: What’s your killer app for the iPhone?
Apple Macos
August 04, 2007 at 12:50pm
Apple can only do really interesting products if Steve Jobs understands the end user. And Jobs does not understand the 21st century computer usage paradigm. In this century, people don’t send memos to each other. And that’s what email is - electronic memos.
Today, people chat; they blog; they share multimedia like pictures, video, and audio; they flame each other on forums; they link with each other in intricate webs; they swap effortlessly between different electronic personae and avatars; they listen to internet radio; they vote on this that and the other; they argue on wiki discussion groups.
Does iPhone maybe support something of these stuffs, I think NOT, my APP would be Social Networking
