Well the App Store is out and what a great system. Every single one of the Programs from the Applications Store is higher quality than any of the Jailbroken stuff that the iPhone had before. I have already bought $30 worth of stuff... which is many many months worth of iTunes Store purchase before. I don’t normally buy music on the iTunes store because of the DRM. All of the Programs that I have synced to my iPhone I can see being used. Even something stupid like iPint is just ridiculously fun. AIM does what it needs to do... it will be better once Apple has the background notification service going. Evernote will be incredibly useful for snapping receipts and business cards for later searching. Twinkle is a gorgeous Twitter App (albeit right now Twitterrific is more reliable). NetNewsWire is the venerable RSS newsreader that I could not live without. Urbanspoon is a terrific app that absolutely captures the idea of location based computing. It finds you and you shake the Phone and it does a lottery of different variables and finds a place for you to eat. Mandelbrot allows you to zoom into fractals in a way that only the iPhone allows. Pandora is an amazing streaming audio app. You just choose a band you like and it will play them and other music like them all for free all over EDGE. If there is a good excuse for Apple to allow background processes this is the only one I have found so far. And then the apps that I paid for are Enigmo and Critter Crunch. These two games are very fun. Enigmo is a full 3D game is actually quite challenging. Critter Crunch is absolutely enthralling. By the time I am done playing it I am gribbing the iPhone twice as hard as I should be and I just don’t want to let go.
Now of course there are some general gripes with third party developers. First, most apps don’t remember where you were too well. When you close them and go back you are often placed at the beginning of the App which is something Apple told everyone specifically not to do. Another complaint is people use the opening Image that the iphone allows as a splash screen. This is incorrect usage. The image is a placeholder to make the transition from the button being tapped on the home screen to your app actually open more smooth. And a complaint with games. Most games have the first problem where if you get a call or go home you lose your position in the game. Also, Critter Crunch pauses the music playing in iPod when it opens. I would really like to be able to play some games while listening to my own music.
These small issues aside, Apple has a great thing going here. The SDK has proven to make much better stuff, much quicker, than the old jailbroken method. If they just add a couple of things like coupon codes and such so that developers can offern incentives and several other things that are not coming to mind right now, it will be the easiest and cheapest way for Developers to sell Apps.

Tags: iphone, apple