Ask HN: Review my "design-oriented" open source app (iPhone, Mac, Maemo)

4 points

17 years ago

To sublimate my unhealthy interest in smartphone software development, I've been working on a cross-platform multimedia app for a while now. Apple recently approved the iPhone version, and thus I figured this might be a suitable junction to beg for your opinions concerning the software.

  The website:    http://lacquer.fi/2020

  App on iTunes:  http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=334032238&mt=8
  (It's free)

Originally I had some noble goals for this project: I wanted to build something useful for that famous "next one billion users" for whom the mobile phone will be the first computer. I wanted the software to be as minimalistic as possible, language-independent, and with an attractive interface. It would be designed for voice and graphics communication, rather than text. The documents should be highly compressed to enable transmission over crap mobile networks in the 3rd world. The code should also be lightweight and portable enough that it would run on the hundreds of millions of cheapo Symbian devices that Nokia is going to dump onto the African and Latin American markets soon.

I still haven't got around to doing a Symbian version (their SDK is pretty terrible all around, it's not something I want to spoil my evenings with)... And overall, I don't have much hopes of being able to do something to benefit those mysterious 3rd world users.

Still, I've got this pile of C code written; it mostly does what I originally set out to do; and now I'd like to make it into something that could be useful to the ordinary smartphone user today, rather than leaving the code to rot in some open source graveyard.

For more general utility, I wrote a "cloud sync" feature using Google App Engine. I'm pretty happy with the way it works on the iPhone. There's a website that offers access to the files as well, although it's quite minimalistic so far. (The Mac OS X application also has the built-in cloud connection. I haven't yet got around to updating the Maemo version with this feature -- anyway Maemo has a regular user-accessible file system, so online storage is not quite as necessary as on the iPhone.)

I guess what I'm now looking for is some feedback on overall direction. Maybe stuff like:

Does this app make any sense to you? Are its design parameters too limiting / ill-chosen? Is there any point in open-sourcing this kind of software? Is there perhaps something else that I could be building on this base instead, rather than sticking to the original idea?

Thanks for reading :)

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