Submitted by Anders Batten on
Apple and some of their featured developers spent a good deal of time showing off some of the new and exiting native applications coming with the official release of the iPhone 2.0 software/firmware. Developers included SEGA, TypePad, eBay, and Loopt - who showed off their very cool social networking application with location based services. Below is a little bit of information on some of the applications developers presented.
SEGA
As you can imagine, SEGA was there to announce a native game for the iPhone (presumably you weren't expecting an office productivity application from SEGA). In this case it was the well-known SEGA classic Super Monkey Ball. The SEGA
developers described how the were able to create 8 levels of the game in just the first week, and after 8 weeks had 1100 levels ready to roll. The graphics look stellar.
TypePad
TypePad, creators of reknowned blogging software Wordpress, talked about their custom iPhone application which allows users to easily update their Wordpress blogs from the iPhone. The cool thing about this application is the image feature. You can take a photo with your iPhone from within the TypePad iPhone application and it pops right into your blog post. This could usher in a new era in mobile blogging.
eBay
We've already seen a few versions of native applications and web applications designed to let you eBay from your iPhone, and this is what the eBay application does. It does look quite neat and clean and a step above the other attemps.Loopt
We all knew something like this had to be coming, but that didn't make it any less cool when it did. Loopt is a social networking application that takes advantage of the iPhone's ability to locate your phone. You can see a map showing where your friends currently are, chat with your friends, make plans to meet (with location-smart directions available at a touch), and more. The application looks great, and to make things even better, will be available free when it becomes available within the iPhone application store.
MLB.com
Newest iPhone FAQs
MLB.com showed off a nice native app which offers up MLB scores, updates, statistics, standings and -- get this -- real-time video highlights added to the application just minutes after the play occurs.
Associated Press
The Associated Press detailed their native application which allows users to send news tips to the AP.
Modality
Modality demonstrated a medical application that offers interesting learning tools for medical students as well as a medical-imaging application used to view CT scans and PET scans.
Pangaea Software
Pangaea offered up info on a two games, one called Enigmo and the other called CroMag rally, that they are released for the iPhone.
Digital Legends Entertainment
Showed off a 3D medieval style game that looks very nice, due for relase in September.
Possibly for the first time, gaming is begining to look very serious on the iPhone.
Thanks to sites like Gizmodo and Engadget who provided live coverage of this year's WDDC, sources from which most of this information was excerpted.
Comments
MH replied on Permalink
With all eyes in the mobile world on Apple this week I thought the time was right to talk about what we believe is the best way to conduct a mobile web search on a device like the iPhone…a device with a rich, full screen, touchscreen only. Namely: Voice search. You say it, our speech recognition (running on a server) produces text, the text automatically dumps into the search engine that’s the subscriber’s choice (Google, AOL, MSN, etc.), the search engine returns results. Or via voice, search for any content from your local iTunes playlists.
Using the Apple developer kit, we’ve been hard at work developing impressive technology that make the iPhones capabilities even more powerful. Voice search. Song search and selection. At the touch of a button and simply by saying the word. Over the next few days – as the excitement mounts for the WWDC – we’ll be sharing more and more details here on our blog. For now though, I think all of us should sit back, relax and enjoy the show.
Of course, we believe the most powerful use of speech would be running on the iPhone itself (vs a remote server) and made available to the developer community via iPhone’s SDK APIs.
-Nuance (www.nuance.com)