Brian White

My vote for the best iPhone App so far is Flashlight, which costs $0.99. It’s not best for reasons of utility or value–there are said to be 4 or 5 other flashlight apps, at least one of them is free. It’s the best because it was probably ridiculously easy to code, and it was accepted by Apple for inclusion in the store, and the early adopters seem to be buying it.

For the uninitiated, a flashlight app puts up a blank white screen, and if you aim it around a dark room, your iPhone suffices as a really nice flashlight.

This app has a whopping 1 of 5 stars in the reviews section. There are 73 reviews thus far. Some choice quotes from the App Store reviews:

You could just take a picture of a sheet of looseleaf and bring it up in the dark for cheaper. That’s a pro tip.

0 MEGS!!!

A blank screen for $1?

You could open up Safari…and go to a blank web page and you got a free flashlight to use with less than 3 taps!

This app managed to crack the top 25 paid apps, so either 1. people need flashlights and found this one first or 2. longshot, but the app gamed its way onto the list (which would suck).

Sometimes though, you have to sit back and admire “Pet Rock” phenomena.

The posts are starting to trickle out of the time zones that are ~ 9 hours ahead of Mountain View, and into the feedreader.

Here’s one I spotted on Google Operating System:

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/03/opengoogle.html

You’ll be able to select from a list of approximately 100 ranking signals like: the page’s self-importance, the number of original ideas, the IQs of their authors, the number of links from Wikipedia, and decide their importance.

Heh, nice…

Looking forward to more.

Update:

Waxy and Anil have (will have) this covered in spades.

I’m reading around about the iPhone SDK announcement, and I see people making a big deal about ActiveSync and ‘Exchange Push.’

My web-based mail client pings home frequently (a couple of times a minute, perhaps) via AJAX techniques. Phone apps have the same HTTP connection available. If you’re curious, keep Gmail open with the LiveHTTPHeaders addon installed and watch the request/responses stream by. Isn’t frequent pull the same as “push?” I’m having an acid flashback of the Wired hype about Push in the mid-90s…and the PointCast screensaver, which “pushed” a bunch of information to you while you were away from your computer…

I guess I’m just annoyed that “Push Technology,” in 2008, is still being called out as something customers need…

Update: Since Third-party apps appear to be limited in that they have to terminate when the user switches apps, this probably makes a daemon harder to run on the iPhone. I’m starting to understand the announcement.

Over at GigaOM, Android’s ‘web-like application’ functionality is covered. I believe there are reasons that a web browser in the phone isn’t the answer to everything-apps for a while (read: Flash on the iPhone), so this wonderful new era of competing phone UIs and functionality is great and long overdue. If one is unsatisfied with a web app in phone-based browser, it’s good that Android (and, I’m presuming, the soon-to-be-revealed-in-detail iPhone SDK) will allow lively parallel apps that work much better in the phone operating stack. And all-you-can-eat phone plans are becoming the norm (the iPhone plan already has unlimited data).

Good times, good times.

OK, I’m done with proprietary video players. As of this second (your fault, T :))

If you send me a video, make sure that 1. you’re searched YouTube for the same filename and send me that URL. Failing that, 2. I can drag and drop the video onto the VLC Player shortcut.

If it won’t play on a click in a browser or in the email link in Gmail–trash can time.

Thanks for listening