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Comment by jjs | Hacker News Reader

You should've seen what was going through my head while watching the original iPhone keynote speech...

This was before we knew that the iPhone wasn't planned to ship with a native API (or that the eventual API and the phone itself would be so crippled), but for a brief, shining moment, I saw a world where everyone had a real computer in their pockets, always connected.

I really ought to go through my notes and implement some of those exuberant ideas for Android.

(To my delight, at least one of them has already been made: Google Sky Map. It's also smarter, as it uses GPS to determine where you are; my idea was to use the camera and image processing to recognize constellations).

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Care to post some of those ideas? Could be an interesting topic for conversation. I think a lot people's thinking about smartphone apps and what's possible has started to get a bit... constrained by what's already popular.

I've been thinking of posting an online commonplace book of ideas that I want to see implemented but don't have the time or inclination or domain-knowledge to implement myself.

I see no reason why you can't make that with the iPhone API right now (with 3GS hardware). It might be faster with a native OpenGL ES implementation too.

That was just one of many, most of which simply can't be done as iPhone apps (and several of which already exist for Android).

But can you give me an example that actually can't official API wise? Google Sky Map can be implemented on the iPhone with official APIs. Other than apps that edit system settings (like Locale) what can't you really do?

Well, the very first thing that I wanted to implement was something like this:

http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/

1. Interpreter/VM with arbitrary code.

2. Open Source

Until recently, VOIP was banned, as well.

Aside from decent notifications and real background tasks (and the aforementioned Locale, which was also on the list), the biggest blockers are the App Store and its restrictive policies.

that was exactly my feeling when I watched original iPhone keynote!

Free at Last, brother! :)

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