Vinko’s Thoughts On…

Now that the iPhone has been officially released for over four months, in four different countries. What is the most desired native application you wish someone, other than Apple, will release?

By “native” I mean application that runs on the iPhone without Safari (MobileSafari).

Before anyone say it, I do know about the vast number of 3rd party applications alresdy out there. I have used many of them, but what I am talking about here are the sanctioned 3rd party applications released by developers utilizing Apple’s official iPhone SDK.

My most desired is something that will be the IM (instant messenger) consolidator, like Adium on the Macintosh and Trillian on Windows. Currently there are MobileChat and Apollo from 3rd party developers, but neither works consistently nor do they allow simultaneous logins to multiple IM services at the same time.

The other thing that I really really wish the iPhone has is copy-and-paste. Apple being the first to made popular the concept of copy-and-paste in its Macintosh OS 24+ years ago, did not release a subset of Mac OS X for the iPhone with copy-and-paste, is very surprising. Now with 6 revisions of the iPhone firmware, we still have yet to see this feature on the iPhone. I wonder if a 3rd party using the official Apple SDK will be able to bring us this feature prevalent across every user interface and applications in the iPhone.

Another cool app will be something to do with the built-in camera on the iPhone. A simple application like MobilePhotoBooth or a more complexed application which will assist with uploading taken photos to the various photo sharing sites: Flickr, Smugmug, etc.. I know there are currently iFlickr and Pushr, but both are flaky and unstable.

Our counter parts on the Windows platform had been playing with Google Earth for almost a year.

As for Tuesday, January 10, 2006, Google made the Mac version of Google Earth public.

If you do not know or have not seen Google Earth, then I ask you to read Google’s description on the Google Earth home page, rather than me describing it to you. Better yet, download the application and check it out for yourself to see what the Mac community has been missing all this time.

BTW: Google had this well before Microsoft decides to launch their Live Local… Local Live… what is it called??

After playing with it for an hour. I can see that Google still have a long way before they are able to make Killer front end applications. The feel of Google Earth for the Mac is like that of the Windows version. The interface feels awkward and definitely not Mac app like.

I guess this opens up an opportunity for 3rd Party to build something more Mac like, that is if Google would release the API for Google Earth as they did for Goolge Map.

You may say, can you be a bit more specific about the deficiency of Google Earth’s UI? Well I can give you one example, since I do not want to get into the details for obvious reasons. The process of adding a Placemark is a bit cumbersome. It requires the user to bring up a web page (wizard) within the user’s default browser. This web page is simply for Google to ask the user to acknowledge the verification of any previous identical Placemark submitted; a manual and user honest process. The subsequent submission form does not copy the title of the Placemark from Google Earth to the form except for the description.

It is obvious, why Google is advertising for Macintosh Developers.

Please don’t get me wrong, this release of Google Earth is very welcomed, and the application fully capable of demonstrating the power and features of Google Earth. I just wish it was more of a Mac-like appliction. I am sure version 2.0 will be much better.

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