Thought Nursery

I loved the event because all of the developers were so charmingly wide-eyed, so stunned and obviously loving what they are doing and the opportunity they see in front of them. David is excited by making novel interactive and social music based software. Steve is still amazed at the response he’s had to the YouTube video of his app Trisim, over 260,000 views. Ramin was showing off PhotoFrolic — take picture, “augment”, share — to people outside his house for the very first time. Rob was able to create on the iPhone an idea he’d had in 2003. And Mike Lee is obviously loving the opportunity to round-up the best developers and pull them into a much more ambitious iPhone startup than the others on display, all for his end goal of reforesting Madagascar.

A couple things I found particularly interesting:

1. Of all the panelists, only Mike Lee had previous experience with Objective-C and Cocoa. Steve is a .NET developer. Ramin Python/Django. Rob wrote his backend web service in Scheme for god sake. Which brings me to…
2. All of the applications under discussion have their own backend web service. I’ve ranted to a few friends lately that the future of web apps is native code, and this was an eloquent demonstration

Tapulous’s FriendBook app is a great example. It allows you to exchange contact information by handshaking  your iPhones at each other. But this isn’t some local data beaming! In the coffee shop/airport setting you might be on different wireless networks (3G vs Edge vs WiFi), so you’re making a remote call back to the cloud with your location and it matches two people in the same place making the same motion. Your web app have access to the accelerometer? I didn’t think so.

Anyway, great meeting, great group of people, and from what I saw we’re all going to be blown away with that AppStore finally opens.