Developers, Get To Work: Third-Party Apps We Need For The iPhone
The iPhone is a terrific smartphone, but it’s got some glaring gaps in what it can do. Many of these gaps are baffling because they’re not particularly glamorous — capabilities that have been available for more than a decade on other PDAs and smartphones are unavailable on the iPhone today. I’m excited about the imminent availability of sanctioned third-party apps on the iPhone in part because I’m looking forward to the iPhone getting some basic capabilities that, frankly, should have been there all along.
Of course, you’ve been able to add third-party applications to the iPhone for months now, but they required unauthorized “jailbreaking” — hacking — of the iPhone, which voided the warranty. Jailbreaking the iPhone is a DIY project and I just haven’t seen any of the existing applications as being worth my time to install.
But a sanctioned, third-party software development kit will open a flood of new applications. I used Palm handhelds for more than a decade, and they have a rich foundation of applications to choose from. I look forward to seeing some of the same innovation — or better — on the iPhone.
My wish list includes:
- The ability to sync memos on the iPhone to the desktop. I work in plain text files most of the day. I’d like to have each memo on the iPhone sync automatically to a plain text file on the desktop, with changes on the desktop reflected on the iPhone and vice-versa. More—>
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