Sunday, July 27, 2008

10 iPhone Improvements or Apps I need ASAP


Spectators at the iPhone Display by duncandavidson.


As many of of my friends know, after 6 hours in line, I'm the proud owner of a new iPhone 3G. (Okay, I know you're all wondering - yes, the white one ;-)

Having now had it for a full week, and having traveled with it from RTP to San Jose on a recent trip for work, here is my top-10 list of things that I need for this amazing device.
  1. Cisco Unified Personal Communicator - By far the best Voice/UC application I have ever used - It really is fantastic and I would love to be able to use it with the camera to do full video conferencing while on a WiFi AP in Chicago O'Hare

  2. Turn by Turn Directions - As has been recently reported, the iPhone 2.1 firmware is bringing speed & direction API's to the SDK.  Please TomTom, Please Garmin - Don't get hung up by it not being your hardware, give the app away for free and sell your navigation/maps/directions as a service. (Google's gonna eat your lunch if you don't)

  3. Security Token Application - Secure Computing, RSA, SecurID - We all use 'em; so please port one over to the iPhone to run natively such that it can pass tokens over to that very cool VPN client that's in the iPhone.

  4. Cut/Copy/Paste - Again, rumored to be in Firmware 2.1; but c'mon - lets get going !

  5. Video Streaming - I'd be live on Qik if I could.

  6. Adium/Pidgin - I really need support for Sametime, MSN, Yahoo in order to full appreciate how terrible it is to try to type on the iPhone

  7. Microsoft RDP Client - Sorry OSS fans - I didn't say VNC (already have that) and I didn't say RDesktop - I think Windows Server 2008's RemoteApp support could be amazing on the iPhone.  Using a TS Gateway, I could run a native Windows Outlook client on my iPhone over SSL. (Oh wait - I almost forgot how much fun it is to  bring up a VPN tunnel every time I want to use corporate resources)

  8. Citrix ICA Client - This client has probably the longest list of supported OS's that I've ever seen in my life, even DOS,  except for one.

  9. Blogger Client - Yeah, I have Shozu; but I've been using Twitter more in the past week than I have in the past 6 months of having an account.  A slick Blogger client would sure wake up DaveStafford.org

  10. Battery Life Improvements ! - Unlike Blackberry who have made battery life expectations that are hard for any device to keep up with, Apple has fallen way short in this area - so if you ever get an e-mail from me that ends abruptly then this might be the reason
That's it for now - so dear application developers from around the world - You write em, I'll buy them. (But please don't charge more than a buck)

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