A wealth of imaginary iPhone Apps

Written on 20th August 2008                                                                                                              5 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur

The iPhone App store is one of the many great features of the Apple iPhone. Hundreds (thousands?) of developers are tinkering away on apps that when launched are sure to bring riches and fame to its inventors. All you have to do is browse the ‘Whats New’ section on your iPhone or iPod Touch on a daily basis and you will be able to choose from a wide variety of innovative new apps. Some useful and some funny.

But there is more. A lot of ‘would-be’ developers are posting their ideas for the perfect app to their blogs and posting mock-ups of next generation interfaces to Flickr. These apps are nothing more than ideas waiting to be implemented and sometimes ideas mainly waiting to be ignored. Either way, here is a selection of inspiring ideas that I found on Flickr:

1. Fancy GPS app

Ricky Romero presents a screenshot, with a big proud smile, of his upcoming GPS app. What will it offer? We can only guess:

2. Parmesan cheese grater

This app is an example of some of the more frivolous designs. From the comments: “In my quest to find the best iPhone apps out there, I submit a Parmesan grater application for your approval. Steve Jobs has not returned my calls, but I think this is a pretty cutting edge idea. Pecorino plug-in sold separately.”

3. Horizontal keyboard outside Safari

A really simple concept for a horizontal keyboard. Of course, this one is already implemented by Apple but only used in Safari when you tilt the iPhone. Wonder when it becomes available for Mail and other apps that use text input.

4. Keep an eye on electricity in your house

A very cool concept which helps you manage energy consumption for your house: “Current State is a real-time energy use monitoring system and timer for powered devices combined into one. The Current State system is made up of two parts, a mobile application for you cell phone, which allows you to control and monitor electricity use from anywhere, and a series of Plug-Ends that give you control over the products around your house.”

5. Scan offices for certain rooms?

I have no idea what this is supposed to be and how it would work. But hey, it looks cool!

6. DJ on the move

This one shouldn’t be that hard to build for someone with Xcode experience. Right?

7. Take presentations to another level

One of the first Apps I bought was Stage Hand. It turns your iPhone into a remote control for Keynote. You can see a preview of your slide and highlight stuff on the screen or read your notes, all on the little screen in your hand. This concept takes it even further and it also look better:

8. Virtual ruler

This one might be one of the most interesting concepts I have seen so far just because it makes me wonder if it could actually work. What do YOU think? “Would be nice to display a virtual ruler over the camera picture to roughly measure distances. Certainly doable as we know the characteristics of the iphone lens. It could use the accelerometers to adjust the perspective (tilt, etc).”

There are a lot more impressive designs for imaginary iPhones, iMacs and iPhone Apps here.

What would your imaginary iPhone app do? Make coffee? Get you hot dates? Yeah, all that. But what else? Let us know…