10 Jul
A brave new world for iPhone apps
Unless you’ve been living in a power-free treehouse for the in conclusion few months or so, you’ve probably heard there’s a new iPhone coming out Friday. While I won’t upgrade to the iPhone 3G immediately, I would like to get one at some point, primarily for the faster data speed—my iPhone is used for data about 95 percent of the time, so 3G would make a notable difference to me. Although I’m excited about the new iPhone 3G, Friday will subsist a apparently be a bittersweet day for me.
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Sure, we’ll be seeing more cool modern hardware, and some selfishly self-possessed new software—Friday also marks the let go of iPhone 2.0 software for all iPhone users, including those of us with the first-generation machines. While the iPhone 2.0 software has other thing nice new features, it’s too now known that it doesn’t include a lot of things we’ve discussed here over the remain year: still missing in action are voice dialing, stereo Bluetooth headset support, and the oh-so-advanced technology known as copy-and-paste. But the omissions in the 2.0 software aren’t the source of my mixed feelings about Friday at every part of.
No, the thing that’s got me feeling both good and poor about Friday is the other thing that happens formerly the iPhone 2.0 software debuts: the opening of the App Store, Apple’s online repository of free and paid-for third-party iPhone software. The App Store will only be available to those running version 2.0 of the iPhone software, so anyone who wants to (or needs to) use the App Store will have to upgrade. Yours truly falls squarely in both buckets—I want to use the App Store, and I need to use the App Store in order to write about some of the cool of recent origin applications available for iPhone users. However, in order to do this, I urgency to say goodbye to my much-loved iPhone 1.1.3 sofwtare (not any, I never upgraded to 1.1.4, the latest version useful).
When I upgrade on Friday, I’m going to lose a bunch of close friends—all of the third-party programs I’ve been running on my iPhone later last August. That’s right; my iPhone hasn’t been in stock form since roughly three months after I received it. So against nearly a year now, I’ve had access to a great assortment of third-party programs that turned my iPhone from a “simple” web-phone-e-mail device into a do-it-all technology solution.
As of this very moment, that’s a collection of 38 applications. Thanks to the ability to add pages of icons to the iPhone, though, my home cloak looks stock. It’s only on the pages beyond that where you can see the depths of my phone’s expanded capabilities:
Everything from productivity (Apollo for iChatting; Snapture for better picture vexation; WeDict for extravagant dictionary lookups, WebSearch to search the tissue; VNC beneficial to distant Mac connections) to fun (NES, a full-blown Nintendo emulator; Labyrinth, a recreation of the wooden marble-on-table-with-holes game of yesteryear; RagingThunder, a 3-D driving game) to customization (SMB Prefs to tweak the iPhone’s await) are handled by my collection of applications…and I’m going to miss each and every one of them come Friday. That’s the “afflictive.”
But the “sweet” is that, starting Friday, I’ll have access to a collection of what will probably be thousands of third-party applications with respect to my iPhone—many of which will hopefully duplicate the capabilities of my in every single in kind’s mouth pile (though I’m not sure Apple would approve of something similar the NES emulator).
Even more exciting for me , though, are the new apps approach along that I haven’t yet considered. Between the iPhone’s wonderful user interface, its locating abilities (even if limited to cell tower location in my generation of the iPhone), and its sensors, I meditate we’re going to see a huge assortment of innovative and useful third-party applications. Hopefully we’ll be able to fill most of the holes on the 25 native iPhone apps catalogue we put together this past spring.
So out with the old, and in with the new—while I’ll miss my old friends, I’m looking forward to making a number of renovated friends in the coming weeks.
