MindSuburbia

I really don’t understand if Apple and iPhone is all about being trendy and trashing your money (for the customer) and becoming popular and rich with iBeer and iFart (for the developer), or actually doing something useful (well, there must be something useful that gets you rich )

Anyway, it turned out that if you can’t write in Objective-C (and here please allow me to be a bad boy: if you really can’t, i would suggest you go doing something different than a programmer), you may now write iPhone Apps with HTML and Javascript, for a mere $99 using this NimbleKit by VolnaTech.

The whole story feels like it doesn’t fit at all to me!
Having just noticed that you may write DHTML fully featured apps using OpenLaszlo or some DHTML libraries/toolkits, it just p*ss me off to see that if you want to make money, you must buy this $99 tookit (seems to me a kind of a bluff).

Hey, I mean no offense to the VolnaTech guys: they’ve been very smart and very hard programmers to make this possible. And I see nothing wrong in making money from your hard working, especially if we’re talking about the iPhone App Store (you can make thousands from iBeer!).

But please, let me explain these simple facts:

• iPhone does not support Flash (among the thousand other missing features), and this is ok, cause Flash may be so nasty with CPU, battery and users, that it’s not a very bad idea. But this make one think: why that? Something to do with the fact that you will buy Apps?
• to develop something for the iPhone you must pass thru a Mac, thru a $100 fee and thru the Apple approval (yes, we’re good guys and do not want to jailbreak). Seen the above doubt?
• iPhone Safari has a native support for DHTML

Now, the only really missing thing for making a DHTML app on iPhone is the offline mode (with the local data storage): otherwise one may just make a 320×240 web page with almost anything possible in it and the result will be exactly the same app as a real one.
Well, given that i don’t know if a DHTML Safari app can handle multi-touch (sure there is a way), of course I don’t know a way to interface the GPS and the Webcam with a web-page (but who knows… maybe there’s a way)

Well, I do not have a Mac (so don’t have XCode and the iPhone SDK), but my idea is: make a simple iPhone App FOR FREE (and even if it’s not for free, jesus, not for $99, but $7.99!).
Make this App in this way:

• a builtin webpage server
• one Safari frame
• a virtual XML storage
• something like a JavaScript API for interfacing iPhone hardware

This will make it possible to:

• write a DHTML application
• add an XML file for keeping data of that (read-writes will be done on the local storage someway)
• wrap it in a special XML/ZIP/manifest/wathever
• deliver it to our DiPhone (DHTML-iPhone) App for offline execution and local storage

Easy eh? …and almost free too!

Now i guess Steve is not paying me for this… (well, maybe he read my previous idea)

P.S.
Ok, for the moment you might just try to make an online DHTML app (without GPS, webcam and local storage) and I belive it will work great

Today David pointed my attention on an article appeared this morning (well, for italians it’s last night ) on the AppleInsider about new ideas (patents) about electronic media distribution kiosks.
It’s not a new idea: some appeared even 10 years ago and nowadays internet kiosks with an USB port are quite common (not counting other kind of kiosks, like info points, picture printers, etc)

Briefly (go and read the full article, if you like), it’s a patent proposal addressing common problems of kiosks, applied on the media distribution (iTunes based).
I won’t go into the details of the patent (they have great ideas for sure), but it seems there’s too much effort for very little coming out of that. Let me explain…

First, kiosks never made it in the real world (if you need internet, you bring your netbook, BlackBerry or wathever it’s your mobile device), second if you planned to take a plane, it sounds quite unusual to put a movie on your player the minute before flying (hey, you planned that! It’s not a bus or the subway: get your media ready player while you’re filling your 24-hour bag )

Second I don’t see why you need to access iTunes, but not to your mail. The opposite may be true: you access the (paying) airport WiFi for your mail and… “hey, what about this new song in iTunes”

So my mind kind of wanders and think: why pay thousands for a patent on kiosks, when you just need to re-program a common hot spot to get the thing done.

Project fonTunes

copyright Mindsuburbian 2009

• Get a Fonera 2 for making hotspots
• Connect an HD to the Fonera 2
• Hack/reprogram the Fonera 2 for adding/editing functionalities
• Write a new app with the developer kit that downloads movies and songs to the HD
• Set up an authentication method so that you can encrypt the connection on the fly (for passwords and credit card info)
• Let the non-paying users go only to “fonTunes” for free
• Let the paying users go both to “fonTunes” and the internet

Steve, if you read this: I may sell my idea for the price of a couple of patents