Ideas for iPhone applications
I thought of two ideas for iPhone applications yesterday and I thought I would share it with anyone interested in pursuing the tasks. I may do it myself if time and motivation allows it, but do feel free to try your luck with them. So here goes nothing.
Life-tracker
The main principle idea is that you could use your iphone to keep track of your life through time, specifically where you have been, what have you been doing and what your thoughts on any given date. The said application would be really simple to use. You launch it, two buttons will make it possible to record your existing location (geolocation coordinates) and/or record thoughts or, say, what it is that you are doing at the moment. You can do that as many times as you wish, whenever you wish. Sometime later, you can sync all that with a web-based service. You could access your life activities through that service ( what have been thinking a year ago this very day? where have I been last week when I was on vacation in London? you want that on a google map - there you go) and so on, so forth. A more or less trivial application to build.
Javascript driven native iPhone applications
This is a no brainer, in fact I wonder why someone ( Apple even ) hasn't thought of it yet. One can expose the iPhone functionality(framework facilities) through Javascript (Javascript objects), have a simple runtime application that 'all' it does is act as the VM/runtime for javascript code. 'Everyone' knows Javascript, everyone(?) likes Javascript, why not make it possible to build real (i.e not hosted on Safari, web-apps ), native applications using the language? A developer would still submit an iPhone application ( the Javascript VM/runtime, with the javascript files and resources in the bundle ) to Apple, Apple, nor the users, would be able to tell the difference. Hey presto, a gazillion apps flood the App store - most will be crappy ( the nature of things ) some will turn out to be gems. If I could make it possible for my brother and my fellow javascript gurus at work to build any app they want as easy as they build our web-apps, that would be kinda cool. Here is what it could look like:
var myButton = new UButton();
myButton.text = "Hello World";
myButton.addListener('click', function(event)
{
alert('Your geolocation is:"+(new ULocation()).toString();
}));
thisWindow.containerView.addView(myButton);
or something.
iPhone User » Blog Archive » Ideas for iPhone applications 12/8/2009 13:23
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George Terezakis 14/8/2009 15:48
It's a brilliant idea, and it has occurred to quite a few other clever chaps! Some of the core iPhone functionality is already exposed to javascript, e.g. for tracking location check out how the Google Latitude mobile website works. And there have been attempts at producing frameworks that bind functionality to javascript objects inside a UIWebView. Here's a nice round-up: http://ejohn.org/blog/iphone-javascript-apps/. There are various reasons why this doesn't work perfectly (they're explained in much detail in: http://drnicwilliams.com/2008/11/10/to-webkit-or-not-to-webkit-within-your-iphone-app/) but there are cases where it does work well enough, and performance will certainly be less of an issue with the 3GS and future models.
It's an issue that bothers Apple's lawyers too: "An Application may not itself install or launch other executable code by any means, including without limitation through the use of a plug-in architecture, calling other frameworks, other APIs or otherwise. No interpreted code may be downloaded or used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple's Documented APIs and built-in interpreter(s)." (SDK agreement, section 3.3.2). This ensures that all code goes through Apple's approval process, and limits the model to frameworks such as those described above, so one cannot create a shop-within-a-shop and start selling off their own apps (Flash would have been a similar "threat" to the AppStore, and that very clause in the agreement is pretty much the reason why there's not -and there will never be- Flash support in Mobile Safari).
I love the life tracker idea :-) I'd imagine it integrated with data that's already being gathered one way or another: the iPhone can be used to track expenses, time, paths in physical space, pictures, calls, text messages, tweets, songs you listen to etc. It's still not technically possible to import and integrate those tracks from the different apps that maintain them, but I'm sure everyone agrees there's huge value and potential in having control over that unified stream of data.
Mikhail Diatchenko 19/9/2009 5:40
Yesterday i stumbled across Titanium Developer by Appcelerator
that allows you to develop iPhone apps using html, css and
javascript. Not only that, you can deploy your apps to Android,
Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
It' kind of similar to Adobe AIR i guess, but more powerful.
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Dimitris Nikolsky 12/8/2009 9:06
I'd love the life-tracker application. Go ahead.