Yawn yawn yawn. He wants Apps for his favourite Google products and social networks. How unbearably dull and unimaginative; quick quick, I need a link to the top 10 knitting patterns from 1897 to liven things up a bit!
Apps (or WebApps) for the iPhone?
I'd like to write one or see one that would do for cars what Shazzam does for music - photograph a car, it recognises it and tells you what it is. Bonus if it does other forms of transport and near-matches too. Totally useless, thoroughly cool.
One that I've mentioned in almost every post here for ages, a service that I can take a photo, it does OCR and feeds the text into Google translate. Bonus points if it does source-language-detection. More bonus points if it is actually usable in a foreign country on real live things like signposts, menus, timetables, advertisements, book covers, leaflets, etc.
How about some over-the-top cool statistics and analytics for next week's London Marathon and July's Tour de France?
How about a Shazzam-alike for ambient noises? Natural stuff? Wave your phone around and it tells you which birdsong that is, photograph something and it tells you which tree has that shaped leaves, what flower or bird or insect you're looking at. Bonus points if it's in any way accurate.
How about a grass-roots weather data feed? Wave your iPhone about and upload some GPS-specific current weather data to everyone's favourite mapping and mass-data crunching big brother, GOoooooooOOooogle and see if they can compete with the Meterological offices. Google Maps with satellite photo exists, why not Google Maps with live (and predicted) weather info overlay? Bonus points if there's a hardware sensor-array accessory for iPhone 3.
Maybe a city or museum tour guide app - go somewhere and pay to download an audio tour. Better if it can pick up data from where you are and guide you to nearby points of interest, and has photos, videos and text too. Even better if it's not that, but this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=492789
Some decent mesh/local networking for iPhone 3 would be brilliant as well. Imagine a megaphone where one person could speak but only other people with tuned in networked phones could hear. Cross between a a shared walkie-talkie channel and a very short range radio broadcast.
"How about a grass-roots weather data feed? Wave your iPhone about and upload some GPS-specific current weather data to everyone's favourite mapping and mass-data crunching big brother, GOoooooooOOooogle and see if they can compete with the Meterological offices. Google Maps with satellite photo exists, why not Google Maps with live (and predicted) weather info overlay? Bonus points if there's a hardware sensor-array accessory for iPhone 3."
You just described the idea behind my (not an iPhone app) startup: OtherWeather.com Would love someone to write me an iPhone app for it though, I've been trying to convince my developer friend to do just that for months.
I used to work over at iWindsurf and iKitesurf and we had planned on doing something like that but it never went through. WeatherUnderground has been allowing user's to upload data from their personal weather stations (PWS) for years. The niche, I think, in this idea is allowing anyone, anywhere with or without special equipment to issue a weather report. There's a massive data storage and standardization challenge with it though.
Rather than new apps, I'd like to see the SDK open up for more powerful apps.
* I'd like Skype to be able to answer a Skype call when the phone's locked (assuming it's the active app).
* I'd like to be able to write a custom keyboards and custom dialers.
* I'd like to be able to send a quick note to Jott without entering my keycode.
* I'd like to see barcode readers as smart as the ones on Android.
* I'd like to see the SDK terms loosened to allow third-party app frameworks. Apple may not be fond of the impurity, but it's crazy that every simple web service needs to write a separate version of their app for Android, iPhone, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, etc. It wouldn't be far fetched to make a gecko-based app framework for mobile devices if the licensing allowed it.
* I'd also like to write iPhone apps in MacRuby.
Another pet peeve, though not necessarily app-related, is how the phone defaults to wifi hotspots that require web-login, breaking every other app until you either go to the website or disable wifi. I'd like either smarter software handling of that situation, or a physical button to enable/disable wifi.
"* I'd also like to write iPhone apps in MacRuby."
Theoretically you could now, around 40 apps in the App Store already use a .CLR bytecode -> native binary compiler produced by Novell as part of Mono. Add IronRuby or IronPython. Serve.
But a) No docs b) I'd rather a native implementation too.
I'd like to see a TI-85 style graphing calculator. Something that has all of the scientific functions, as well as basic 2-D graphing capabilities. I wouldn't need it to be programmable like the TI calculators, though.
I have also seen financial calculators for the iPhone; these aren't very useful to me as an Engineer. I haven't yet come across a scientific calculator with graphing capabilities for the iPhone. If you find one, please post a link!
I've been using Aardvark for the past couple of weeks, and I'm sorry to say but it is truly pointless.
Almost all of the questions are specific to the Bay area, and most of them are just people looking for Google-replacements, e.g. "What's the half-life of Uranium-235?". Only a tiny portion are well-worded, opinion-based questions like the system was meant to handle.
Even then, the system does not seem to respect my preferences at all, and continues to send me questions out of my field of expertise or geography (which the system knows), and fails to learn from this constantly.
The only part of Aardvark that impresses me is their uncanny ability to assign categories to submitted questions.
Also, the system does not inspire confidence at all, when it takes a full day to get you two answers to a simple question, and half the time your question goes unanswered. The system suffers horribly from the chicken-and-egg users problem and I don't feel like it's structured to overcome it.
Apps (or WebApps) for the iPhone?
I'd like to write one or see one that would do for cars what Shazzam does for music - photograph a car, it recognises it and tells you what it is. Bonus if it does other forms of transport and near-matches too. Totally useless, thoroughly cool.
One that I've mentioned in almost every post here for ages, a service that I can take a photo, it does OCR and feeds the text into Google translate. Bonus points if it does source-language-detection. More bonus points if it is actually usable in a foreign country on real live things like signposts, menus, timetables, advertisements, book covers, leaflets, etc.
How about some over-the-top cool statistics and analytics for next week's London Marathon and July's Tour de France?
How about a Shazzam-alike for ambient noises? Natural stuff? Wave your phone around and it tells you which birdsong that is, photograph something and it tells you which tree has that shaped leaves, what flower or bird or insect you're looking at. Bonus points if it's in any way accurate.
How about a grass-roots weather data feed? Wave your iPhone about and upload some GPS-specific current weather data to everyone's favourite mapping and mass-data crunching big brother, GOoooooooOOooogle and see if they can compete with the Meterological offices. Google Maps with satellite photo exists, why not Google Maps with live (and predicted) weather info overlay? Bonus points if there's a hardware sensor-array accessory for iPhone 3.
Maybe a city or museum tour guide app - go somewhere and pay to download an audio tour. Better if it can pick up data from where you are and guide you to nearby points of interest, and has photos, videos and text too. Even better if it's not that, but this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=492789
Some decent mesh/local networking for iPhone 3 would be brilliant as well. Imagine a megaphone where one person could speak but only other people with tuned in networked phones could hear. Cross between a a shared walkie-talkie channel and a very short range radio broadcast.