The Devver Blog

I know everyone has posted a list of the best/must-have iPhone apps. I am sure many people have also posted lists of Apps they would like to have, but it is amazingly fun so I decided I should do it to.

This is my list of apps and solutions I want for the iPhone. They don't have to all necessarily be native apps. If you know of an web-app (that works on the iPhone) which provides the functionality I am looking for, let me know.

I want something like Brain Age for the GameBoy on the iPhone. Spending a few minutes doing little puzzles and math when I have downtime seems like a better use of my time then just playing random games. I have Brain Tuner, which is nice, but I want some more options/different puzzles.

I want a Google Contacts to Apple contacts one-time syncer, All my iPhone contacts are missing their emails. All my Gmail contacts are missing their phone numbers, someone help me sync that up.

I want full syncing between my Google calendar and the native apple calendar app. I always had this and it was really easy to do on pocket PC. I want a full 2 way sync. Google and Apple seem pretty buddy buddy, so get on this.

I want flash cards, with prebuilt decks. I would like to be able to work my way through some word decks building my vocabulary. I also would love to have some Spanish/English decks. I am working on improving my Spanish by listening to Coffee Break Spanish, and having a Spanish study deck would be great.

I want an EBook reader - oh wait, someone just pointed one out to me (thanks Matt) it is called Stanza. It's seriously awesome, if they add a screen reader, it would be perfect. I could listen to some classics books while jogging/driving.

I want GPS tracking that works. I have a great iPhone app called Trailguru, which tracks movement/location with GPS and can tell me the speed and total distance I go when I run. The problem is my GPS seems to stop working after a day or two, and won't come back until I restart the iPhone or re-sync. Then I want a driving direction helper, something that says out loud, "turn approaching in 200 feet," just like every in-car navigation system.

I want an on-the-go web reader (Ben shared this idea with me). This would offer a way to open/transfer all the tabs or URLs currently in my browser over to the iPhone. Preferably, it would open them all in an offline mode allowing me to then read the articles through out my day, while being on the move. I really would like if this wasn't even in Safari since that crashes the iPhone too often.

I want a full Flash player, or at the very least the ability to play Flash videos. There are so many sites with Flash videos and streaming video that are useless on the iPhone. I really wanted to watch the debates on my iPhone because I had to leave in the middle, but while every site on the internet was streaming the debates, not one of them had a way to view the debate on an iPhone. Apparently Adobe has confirmed working on Flash, but Apple is likely to block it. Screw you Apple, even Pocket PC phones years ago had Flash.

I want streaming internet radio. Yes, Pandora and a few others are nice, but why can't I just browse and listen to any streaming net radio station? It would be even better if it could allow me to browse many of the well known stations (shoutcast), with out having to search through iPhone's browser.

I want something similar to Elasticfox for managing and monitoring EC2 instances on the iPhone. Actually beyond that it would be cool to be able to manage a few scripts and SSH credentials on a site. It wouldn't allow arbitrary SSH, but you could store ssh login keys and a few scripts it could run and return the results. This would allow you to ahead of time write some scripts to monitor, clean up, restart or do other tasks, which you could then execute and verify the results of remotely over your iPhone. A sysadmin's dream, until then I have pTerm for slow clumsy SSH.

That is all I have for now, but if you have thought of iPhone apps you would like to have leave some comments. If you know of a solution to any of the problems I mention above let me know. Some of these apps I would be willing to pay for so developers get busy.