The iPhone weekend

Not content to write a semi-boring web app that brings the world the top trafficked sites tagged for your pleasure, I am toying with the idea of creating an app for the iPhone. It's no big secret I fell in love with Apple Mac's nearly a decade ago. Since then I've seen the aqua interface come a very long way. From the buggy unfinished version 10.0 that didn't even work "properly" to Leopard that makes a mockery of the 5 plus years Microsoft spent dawdling on Vista, it's grown stronger than I'd ever dare imagine at the time. Now, with Cocoa Touch, it's gone where no OS has gone before, in my mind. (Hey, it's just my mind).

Before the iPhone I started learning Objective-C and Cocoa but soon became disillusioned through viewing the wonderful efforts of teams of developers at places like Panic software and The Omni Group. How am I going to compete with that? Not very successfully I concluded. There are a zillion and one apps for the Mac's these days, and I'm delight there are. It's quite nice to see Apple promote 3rd party apps on their site. They're quite fussy, and hopefully that brings a sense of quality to what they endorse. OK enough rabbiting on about the download area of their site.

Why an iPhone app? It's leading the mobile networking revolution and it's the most revolutionary phone ever created. Is that enough of a reason? Not really. The idea came to me, to provide a means to manage written content locally while offline. Content downloaded via subscription to publishers that provide access to digital archives of thousands of articles available to subscribers.

One area of online life that I think is stalling is the personal management of  what we find online.  My del.icio.us tag cloud  is more like an overcast sky these days. del.icio.us/zoostation Impossible to use. What annoys me about del.icio.us is that there is no concept of grouping tags. Before you scream "Bundles!" at me. Think about this: why can't I apply a Bundle to a bookmark? Why can't I create Bundles of Bundles? Del.icio.us doesn't seem capable of learning from my past actions. It doesn't remember what tags I used in my last post. It should. It makes sense. If you spend the morning researching something online, there stands a good chance of the links you save, all having a common thread. (Yes, I know, I've used the word thread.) Can we represent those in a group "Suggested Tag Group"?
It would be nice.

So collecting online articles to your phone, for reading offline I think is a good idea. Take the beta product to major online publishers, make the app interface via SOAP, allow publishers to develop plug-in's to encapsulate this interface and Bob's your auntie so to speak.