iPhone SDK wheels are already turning

Wil Shipley (of Delicious Monster/Delicious Library) is already stirring the pot a bit with some interesting ideas for iPhone apps, most of them to do with social networking. I really hope someone writes Gnip-Gnop in time for WWDC 2008.

Frasier Spiers has a nice post about the business of iPhone apps. My own experience with the Palm OS was that it was easy to put a lot of time and money into developing an app that would not pay its own way. With a likely requirement for software signing or other “blessing” by Apple before an iPhone app can be loaded, I think the overhead for producing and selling an iPhone app will be a substantially higher percentage of cost than it is for a desktop app. Thanks to Brent Simmons for finding this post.

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Mac software

The GeoMoose is Loose

The GeoMoose project yesterday announced their 1.0 release. GeoMoose is an AJAX interface for MapServer. It appears to be ideal for organizations that want to put GIS-like capabilities on the web, with end-user control of layer visibility, attributes, and view parameters.

I spent some time last night trying out the GeoMoose demos. It feels really fast. Zooming and panning are faster than on Google Maps. Image quality is pretty good. I told one of the developers that I think they waited too long to release their 1.0 version; the overall feel is very mature.

I haven’t looked into the back end, so I can’t say anything about ease of configuration or installation. GeoMoose worked for me on Firefox and on Safari 3.0, but not on Safari 2.0, so Mac OS X Tiger users will need to install the 3.0 beta (or wait for Leopard).

GeoMoose should get a look by anyone who wants to put large quantities of GIS data on the web. Any site where the end user is dynamically controlling the map layers or interacting with the data is a candidate for GeoMoose. It looks like a good peer of MapGuide Open Source but is a pure MapServer solution. The GeoMoose demo sites were substantially faster than similar sites I’ve seen for viewing property parcel data–but those slower sites were built with ESRI software.

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Mapserver, OSGeo