See What’s Out There

David Pogue, who I will see this week in New Orleans when he gives the keynote at the Nonprofit Technology Conference, is very bullish on the iPhone. If this is what it could be, it will be another important way nonprofits will be communicating with their constituents (as if we don’t have enough to do.)

The idea here is that any programmer can now write software for the iPhone. Not illicit, hacky apps like people have been writing so far, but authorized, tested, legitimate software, much of it free, that can tap into all the features of the iPhone.

There’s a video of Steve Jobs’s announcement.

About two-thirds of the way into it, you can see demos of five iPhone programs that software companies came up with when given two weeks with the SDK. There was an AIM chat program, a sales-force automation tool, and so on, all good-looking and natural-feeling on the touch screen. And there was an Electronic Arts game that exploits the iPhone’s accelerometers, which detect how you’re tilting the iPhone in any dimension; in this game, you navigate the 3-D world by tipping the iPhone forward, back, left, right, up or down.

I can’t tell you how huge this is going to be. There will be thousands of iPhone programs, covering every possible interest. The iPhone will be valuable for far more than simple communications tasks; it will be the first widespread pocket desktop computer. You’re witnessing the birth of a third major computer platform: Windows, Mac OS X, iPhone.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 17th, 2008 at 11:49 am and is filed under 08ntc, iphone. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.