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);

Tuesday, 11 August 2009 10:30 pm