So, it’s (nearly) official: the long-awaited iPhone is coming out Q1 2007. We know next to nothing about it, just that the same company that builds the iPod is right now busy churning out millions of the little buggers.

People seem to have a lot of hope for the iPhone; they foresee a revolution in cell phone technology on par with the iPod– or some just want a PDA that can actually sync with their damn Mac. But what features are people expecting, exactly?

The most seemingly obvious feature, music and iTunes syncing/sales isn’t a sure thing as the iPhone would surely cannibalize iPod sales. But, personally, I think we’ll certainly see a 4-Gig flash card in the little bugger, making it level with the Nano. I think Apple will skip video for the first generation, and maybe forever: make the iPod (with its giant hard drive) the default Apple video device.

What else? It’s already been rumored that the phone(s) will have slick Instant Messaging implementation, which would have it compete with the Sidekick and its ilk. Web browser, contact book w/ pics and all the standard PDA do-dads are to be expected. I’m not sure if Jobs would sign off on a mini QWERTY keyboard; he’s not one for compromise, and the thumb-cramping plastic keys are certainly a compromise. This then is one glaring area where Apple could make vast improvements: it would be very cool to see the iPhone ship with a functional built-in lasar keyboard projector, though not very likely.

People have been speculating on a built-in iSight camera for video chat; now that would be cool.

Adding in new technological wowers like video chat, iPod capabilities, and some Apple-chic design is probably enough to sell a whole mess of iPhones. But I wouldn’t necessarily be very happy with such a device. As stated before, I’d rather see Apple tackle and creatively solve common phone problems (like typing) than add on superfluous features for technology writers to gush about.

As a Blackberry user, one big smart phone problem I think Apple could hit a homerun with is web-browsing.

Using the web with a PDA is a chore at the best of times. It’s slow. Moving around sites is clunky. You have to turn images off to achieve sane loading times, making navigation on many sites near-impossible. Even on mobile-ready sites like CNN.com, I have to scroll through 4 or 5 screens of side navigation links (which, of course, don’t fit on the side of my tiny screen and so are listed vertically) to get to the story I wish to read.

The tactic of phone designers thus far seems to be: get web designers to design for mobile standards. But we’re a decade into the game now and I’m ready to state that’s never, never going to happen.

But, luckily for phone designers, a solution has fallen into their lap. We very rarely visit websites anymore: instead, via RSS, we bring the information on websites to us.

The fact that my Blackberry doesn’t ship with an RSS feed reader is appalling. It should be constantly retrieving the FULL TEXT of blogs I subscribe to and storing the stories on the device for a few days.

I think an iPhone could do one better: Widgets. Imagine if the iPhone is capable of running the now-vast library of user-created Apple Widgets? No more scrolling around websites on a tiny screen, no more clicking through links and waiting on load times. Instead, on your iPhone’s “Dashboard Screen,” simply click on your ESPN Scoreboard widget and have all of the scores display via beautiful graphics perfectly fitted to your little screen. Instead of going to different sites to gather information, the information is brought to a widget you download once and formatted perfectly. CNN headlines, Netflix rental queues, and on and on. I think Widgets for the iPhone could be its most revolutionary feature of all.

One last note. With the ascendancy of YouTube, an iPhone that could play internet Flash video would be the ultimate waiting-in-line time killer…

iTunes doesn’t work. There, I said. In this era of planned-obsolescence, iTunes is doing things your local refrigerator manufacturer can only dream of.

I have a handful of iTunes-bought music littering my mostly-illegal iTunes music library. About ten or so were downloaded via Pepsi’s free song promotions, and, it seems, I even downloaded a few $10 albums over the past 3-years. I’m aware of this not because I ever listen to the songs, oh no, but rather because I get an annoying error message every time I synch my iPod: “iTunes could not sync certain songs because they are not authorized to play on this computer.” Ah, yes, those damn iTunes-bought songs. Since I inevitably sync my iPod as I run out the door, these days more to grab the latest podcasts than to update my song collection, I simply cancel the message, pop out the podicle, and race to my car. And thus the cycle continues.

I couldn’t tell you what email address(es) the said iTunes songs were bought under. Since, I would guess, I bought and downloaded the songs shortly after iTunes began selling music, probably for sheer novelty factor, they’re most likely under my old college email address, an account I, of course, have no access to now that I’ve graduated. I’m sure iTunes has some kind of system set up whereas I can go in, answer “safety” questions, fill out a new account, put in a new credit card number (since I’ve switched banks, I’m sure they’ve got an old debit card on file as well), etc., etc., etc… Haven’t done that yet, pretty sure I won’t be doing it later, not when I could have the whole album downloaded illegally and without DRM (Digital Rights Management) restrictions in less time than it would take to reauthorize my songs for my new iPod and computer (heck, since I already paid for the songs, I won’t even feel guilty about it).

This post could go in many directions at this point: I could ponder the logic in using temporary-by-their-very-nature email addresses as user account names with something you supposedly “own” forever (10-years ago I had an AOL email address, for chrissake), or how the heck my grandmother is supposed to figure out how to re-authorize her latest Frank Sinatra tracks when she moves to a new iMac. But let’s just keep it simple: iTunes (more specifically, DRM) doesn’t work for the following reason: I’m not at all confident that 10-years from now, on whatever flying-spaceship computer I happen to be using, I’ll be able to play the iTunes songs I bought in 2006. I think the format will either be totally discontinued, or at some point over in the decade, I will have failed to have jumped through one of the maddening hoops Apple and the music labels erected, and I will have lost my chance to “update” the song status to play on my new computer(s). Because I’m not confident I’ll be able to use the songs I bought 10-years hence, I simply don’t buy them. To me, that means iTunes and DRM is broken.

Yahoo! is now trying to start its own music download service. The service will sell MP3’s without any restrictions, just like you used to be able to download on old illegal Napster. Since they have no restrictions, they’ll never expire or need to be re-authorized. They’ll be able to play on any portable music player that can play MP3’s (virtually all of them). They’ll just be the music you bought, nothing more. But, you guessed it, music co.’s aren’t too keen on giving consumers this much freedom. Fine. Keep putting up false walls, music industry, I’ll keep downloading music for free, and you won’t see a dime.

Switching back to a Mac after a decade of Windows use changed a lot of things about my computing. Probably the biggest change was that I could once again “trust” my operating system to do things right. When I used Windows I would, as a rule, immediately disable any kind of “automated” task Windows, or a specific program, may try to impose on me. For instance, whenever you installed drivers for a new digital camera on Windows (err, don’t have to do that crap anymore now that I’m using a Mac) the camera maker would always bundle into that install some lame photo organizing software that would look like crap, be slow as crap, and work like crap. So, I’d always have to delve into the new program’s preferences and disable the newly set default (a default set without my knowledge, usually) which would otherwise launch that photo program whenever I hooked up my digital camera.

Another example is what would happen in Windows when you inserted a CD into your computer’s CD Drive. By default, Windows would automatically “Launch” the CD’s .exe file, which would, ideally, lead you to the CD’s instillation process. But this automatic launching, for whatever reason, only worked with about 75% of software CD’s I placed in the drive, and so, when I put in a CD belonging to the unlucky 25% bracket, I’d sit there for minutes waiting for an instillation dialog to pop up that was never coming. I’d just sit there waiting like a big jerk!

Because of these annoying inconsistencies, I would always turn off any kind of automatic procedure in Windows; they were simply too unreliable. If I did it manually, at least I would know it would work. I continued this behavior when I switched to a Mac, but slowly learned to I could trust the Mac’s auto-features. My Mac would always recognize my digi-cam, and launch iPhoto. I could double-click a new font I downloaded, and it was automatically be installed as a system font. Like that Mac twerp from the commercials says, “things just kind of work on a Mac.”

That was the biggest change that came with moving to a Mac; I started to trust the system again. The second biggest change was my rekindled love affair with independently developed shareware apps. I didn’t use much shareware on Windows. It was always clunky, ugly, slow, and 90% of the time it was riddled with spyware and viruses. But since spyware and viruses aren’t an issue on a Mac (yet…), and shareware is often the only solution to solve a task you wish to complete on a Mac, I dipped my toes into the shareware stream and downloaded a couple… WOW!

Probably because so many graphic artists use Mac’s, Mac Shareware apps are almost always frickin’ beautiful. They’re usually lightweight, single purpose, well-designed little drops of perfection. There are even sites devoted to the most beautiful Mac downloadable Mac apps…

That rather long and involved introduction finally leads us here, to the topic of today’s post. The same guy who created the most beautiful Mac downloadable apps list, an 18-year-old kid named Phil Ryu, has come up with a great idea for a contest: My Dream App.

It’s “the event where 24 finalists compete for a chance to have their dream app made into reality.” Anybody can submit a written idea for a new piece of Mac shareware software. A group of “A-list Mac Celebrities” (they’ve got Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak on board, and also digg.com founder Kevin Rose) will judge the top 24-finalists, and visitors of the site can cast their vote as well, and a thus a winner will be picked. The winning application idea will then be passed off to a group of (again) “A-list” software developers, graphic artists, etc., who will bring the winning app to life and offer it for download/sale. The person who submitted the winning idea will share in the software’s royalties, and the top 3 finalists will all receive cool prizes.

Not bad, eh? They’ve already got 20-or-so finalists listed on the site, and you can check out their software ideas. Couple of my fav’s:

1. Herald

Using carefully selected RSS feeds of world’s best newspapers, websites, comics and its own intelligence, it creates your very own newspaper. Interface similar to Pages and Stationery lets you create a newspaper just by dragging and dropping RSS feeds to right places on beautifully designed pages. And you can drop your own articles, PDFs and e-books too. Update instantly. Print it. Export for PDA or iPod. Move through issues like microfilms. It’s last news reader you’ll ever need.

My Take: I’ve been hoping for this type of thing for a while. I’d set it up with the NY Times’ editorial page, the LA Times local page, Variety for Hollywood news, back to the NY Times for world events, throw in a little Slashdot for technology… And it will all be set up to look like a standard newspaper; I miss that in this brave new web-news world…

2. Blossom

Choose a desktop plant to illustrate achievement of one’s goals. Create criteria that “feed it,” and criteria that “neglect it.” For example, to feed it: Actively use Excel over 20 minutes per hour. To Neglect it: Actively use of Firefox or Safari over 15 minutes per hour. If your plant is healthy and growing/flowering/etc, you know you’re meeting your goals. Consistently failing to meet one’s goals will slowly wilt the plant. Clicking on the plant can display stats of current health and graphs of app usage.

My Take: A decidedly “lite” program, that’s for sure, but a cool idea none-the-less. Let me know when I’m slackin’!

3. Whistler

Whistle while you work. Beat that Drum! App converts your tune to MIDI for use in GarageBand or any other audio application. With optional pitch correction for the out of tune. Records as much dynamics of the performance as possible. Also allows simple real-time playing with built in instruments and layering of recordings for quick fun compositions. Can also listen to your finger drumming. I often tap out drum beats with my fingers. Using objects on my desk that make 2 or 3 distinctive sounds. The hardware in a laptop can detect this in multiple ways. The microphone & the motion sensor. The user could define sounds the software could recognize and transmit any midi notes/velocity. (I have tried this with the earthquake detecting program, it can definitely see the strength)

My Take: Sweet deal! To heck with pounding keys on your synthesizer to figure out what notes you’ve got in your head. Just whistle ‘em and the notes go into GarageBand. You can then pick an instrument you want to play them, and mess around with all their attributes. A great way to get started on a song. Added bonus: this program should have online look-up capability, so you can whistle the tune to a popular song whose name you can’t remember, and it will fetch the song title and artist.

So that’s that. Some people on the tech sites have been complaining that people are stupid to submit their ideas to this contest, as they’ll only receive a fraction of any royalties their software will make if they win. These people are idiots. Ideas don’t mean anything in this world; it’s the execution of an idea, the finished product, that matters.

I’ve got high hopes for this contest. It’s an American Inventor for software. I’ll actually be really disappointed if one of the apps that doesn’t appeal to me gets picked. I better get voting!