I’d Buy That For A Dollar

Now that the iPhone SDK is available, I’m sure dozens of people are scrambling to write apps that will make them a fortune, five dollars at a time.

Well, the only idea I’ve had so far – that’s not exactly true, call it the one I want most – is a pdf reader. Really simple, at least for someone familiar with Cocoa and manipulating pdf files. Here’s what I want it to do:

• Provide storage for pdf files on the iPhone, and a way to easily sync them from iTunes, which already knows how to store them
• Provide a reader interface which allows for some choice of font size, at least, and some easy way to page through it (I’m not sure how well the finger flicks would work – they’re fine for web pages, but if you’re going to read long documents, maybe another control is warranted)
• Manual-bookmarking – some ability to bookmark a page or spot on a page to come back to later.
• Auto-bookmarking. This would work like podcasts – if I quit the pdf reader, or get a phone call or whatever, it should remember where I was in that file, and go there automatically next time I load it
• Optional: Maintain any pdf “playlists” I set up in iTunes, so I can categorized my pdf files (e.g. Fiction, Non-Fiction, Smut, etc.)

That’s basically it. I see this as a big win for the iPhone, though, for the following reason: It extends its “boredom killing” abilities.

That, I think has been the killer app of all mobile devices, from phones to PDAs to media players. Try to remember what you did BME* when you were in line for something, or filling up the gas tank, or on an airplane or whatever. You might have had to <gasp!> talk to someone, or interact with the world around you. But now, you just whip your your device-du-jour and play a game, or surf the internet, or play music, or listen to a podcast. Boredom has been banished, mostly.

This would make it even better – you could read eBooks on the airplane, or any other place where signal was insufficient, or you wanted to save battery life.

Right now, I have a series of eBooks sitting on my computer that I got from tor.com, and I don’t know if or when I’ll get to read them, because I don’t want to print them out, and I don’t feel like reading them on the computer. But if I had them in my pocket at all times, I’d definitely get through them.

The main difference between this app and reading pdfs in Mobile Mail are that you can do it in Airplane Mode, and you can have bookmarks – both are crucial.

(Just doing a quick Google search for “iPhone pdf reader” uncovers, among a bunch of apps that require jailbreaking and some websites you can upload your pdfs to, this hack, which I may just start using for now. But I’d still rather have the full-fledged app.)

If no one else writes this app, I might just do it myself, but the only way to get it onto the phone is to pay the $99 to be an official developer. Who knows, do you think enough other people would pay $5 for this type of app that I could make my $99 back?

What iPhone apps would you like to see?

*BME: Before the Mobile Era