An iPhone app-a-day in November

The market for unofficial third-party iPhone applications has been somewhat stagnant in recent weeks. After a flurry of initial activity, the pace slowed considerably, perhaps in part due to iPhone software/firmware 1.1.1's temporary disablement of easy third-party app installation methods.

Though there's now a method for adding native applications to 1.1.1 iPhones that is even easier than the original AppTapp method (and an unofficial SDK), other factors continue to mitigate the unofficial market:

• Developers have yet to establish a method for monetizing native iPhone applications;
• Apple could introduce a new iPhone software/firmware update that again disables current app-add methods
• Apple is going to introduce its own scheme for third-party applications on the iPhone in February, 2007. This scheme could render current unofficial applications inoperable (though it's expected most will be at least portable) or require authentication/certification that might shut out unofficially developed apps.

Seeking to jumpstart development, Sean Heber of SpiffyTech has set an ambitious goal: release a new, original, native iPhone/iPod Touch application every day in the month of November.

Heber told us "The idea came to me by way of my friend Jeremie Miller (trivia: he's the creator of Jabber).  He helped me come up with a list of ideas, but isn't going to develop anything himself. I have another friend who has indicated he might help with an app or two, but so far I've yet to see any action from his end. So in short - yeah, it's just me and I'm going forward under the assumption that it will remain an essentially solo project."

On whether or not he's been sandbagging apps for the project, Heber says: "I've got a very small buffer of simple apps built up over the last 1.5 weeks - but not enough to make me feel very comfortable. I'll be quite busy between now and the end of November building fun little apps and flying by the seat of my pants and hoping I can actually complete all 30 days of this.  There's more than enough little ideas to go around - but it remains to be seen if there's enough time in 30 days with juggling life and a full time job!"

To get apps that that come through the App-a-day program, put Installer.app on your iPhone then, within Installer.app, tap "Install," then "Sources" and select "iApp-a-Day." This will add a repository to Installer.app, which will appear as a folder named "iApp-a-Day" in the "Install" tab.

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