The Shape Of iPhone Applications
2008-02-04
With the iPhone SDK coming soon, I'm looking forward to a new kind of application, one that installs in two or more places and uses the mobility of the iPhone to extend the Macs that we currently have on our desks in a new way.
Many iPhone apps will offer this:
The app installs on the phone and that is it. It runs on the iPhone and doesn't talk to anything. Think of games, utilities, and the like. Of course the iPhone has internet access, so we'll also see apps that do this:
Safari already does it, so it's no big deal. Weather, stocks, and other simple gather-the-data-and-display-it apps will be numerous. There will be others that have a server end and an iPhone end:
The Google map application does this. Note that Google/Apple writes the code for both ends of the connection; if you don't have both, nothing happens. There is no browser in use here, and not necessarily any standard protocol. But most software developers don't have a huge server infrastructure like Google. And there are all sorts of scaling and billing problems with this kind of application if you are a small shop. So what do you make?
What I'm thinking of is an application that looks like this:
This is one application from one vendor that comes in two parts: one part that is installed on the iPhone and one part installed on the Mac. There are no scaling problems since for each customer only a few iPhones connect to a few Macs. The customer owns both ends. Billing is also not an issue, since it's not the Mac that is a precious resource here. This kind of app extends what I have on my Mac to my iPhone. Quicken could do this (but I bet it never will). Back up software could do this to tell me what had happened and get my response.
Another type of application could look like this:
The iPhone accesses data on the internet and the home Mac to get its job done. The Mac supplies personal information, maybe passwords, home address, account information, and the internet servers supply the other data needed. The idea here is that the Mac has the personal knowledge and the internet servers have the world knowledge. The two are combined to do things that could not be done in any other way.
Probably a better way of doing the same thing given the much larger storage and bandwidth of the home Mac is this:
Apple is already doing this with iTunes, but nobody else is. The iPhone can now use all the accounts that the Mac can, so there is no extra work. Privacy and billing are handled by the same mechanisms that the desktop uses.
Let's say you were running Delicious Library on your home Mac. With an app from Delicious Monster running on the iPhone you could access your media library in real time. With that, you could use your iPhone to lend things out, look up books you found on your travels to see if you already had them or needed just that one to complete a set. You could add voice annotations to books that you have at home. You could browse your home media collection and compare what you paid with those in front of you at the thrift store. Or compare what you see with what is currently selling on eBay and be sure you don't already have it. And a zillion other applications that create value by extending the personal desktop computer to the mobile hand.
Many iPhone apps will offer this:
The app installs on the phone and that is it. It runs on the iPhone and doesn't talk to anything. Think of games, utilities, and the like. Of course the iPhone has internet access, so we'll also see apps that do this:
Safari already does it, so it's no big deal. Weather, stocks, and other simple gather-the-data-and-display-it apps will be numerous. There will be others that have a server end and an iPhone end:
The Google map application does this. Note that Google/Apple writes the code for both ends of the connection; if you don't have both, nothing happens. There is no browser in use here, and not necessarily any standard protocol. But most software developers don't have a huge server infrastructure like Google. And there are all sorts of scaling and billing problems with this kind of application if you are a small shop. So what do you make?
What I'm thinking of is an application that looks like this:
This is one application from one vendor that comes in two parts: one part that is installed on the iPhone and one part installed on the Mac. There are no scaling problems since for each customer only a few iPhones connect to a few Macs. The customer owns both ends. Billing is also not an issue, since it's not the Mac that is a precious resource here. This kind of app extends what I have on my Mac to my iPhone. Quicken could do this (but I bet it never will). Back up software could do this to tell me what had happened and get my response.
Another type of application could look like this:
The iPhone accesses data on the internet and the home Mac to get its job done. The Mac supplies personal information, maybe passwords, home address, account information, and the internet servers supply the other data needed. The idea here is that the Mac has the personal knowledge and the internet servers have the world knowledge. The two are combined to do things that could not be done in any other way.
Probably a better way of doing the same thing given the much larger storage and bandwidth of the home Mac is this:
Apple is already doing this with iTunes, but nobody else is. The iPhone can now use all the accounts that the Mac can, so there is no extra work. Privacy and billing are handled by the same mechanisms that the desktop uses.
Let's say you were running Delicious Library on your home Mac. With an app from Delicious Monster running on the iPhone you could access your media library in real time. With that, you could use your iPhone to lend things out, look up books you found on your travels to see if you already had them or needed just that one to complete a set. You could add voice annotations to books that you have at home. You could browse your home media collection and compare what you paid with those in front of you at the thrift store. Or compare what you see with what is currently selling on eBay and be sure you don't already have it. And a zillion other applications that create value by extending the personal desktop computer to the mobile hand.
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