In 1997 I gave a talk at the UIST user interface conference. I brought with me a Palm Pilot upon which I had implemented the computer program that demonstrated the interface I was going to talk about. A colleague of mine pointed out that you can “beam” applications between two Palm Pilots (via the short-range infrared transceiver built into each one), so I beamed the app to him, and we agreed he could pass it on.
He beamed it to some people, they beamed it to some other people, and so on. The app. spread pretty quickly. By the time I gave my talk later that day, a fairly large contingent in the audience had already played with the program for themselves, and in fact many were trying out various features while I gave the presentation describing those features.
I thought the entire energy around that process was very exciting. There was something quite friendly and democratic in the way we could share that program around. There was also something rather sweet about how the process itself was so personal – literally passing something on to a friend.
These days you could write something for the iPhone and upload it for Apple to distribute. What doesn’t happen now is the sort of peer-to-peer grass-roots beaming of things that we were doing on the Palm Pilot back in 1997.
I kind of miss that.
Yep, it really is kind of sad. And it wouldn’t be too hard to implement some kind of scheme to this over Bluetooth either, especially for the free apps. *Sob*. Till then…I’m still sticking to my 2002 vintage Clie with 16MB of volatile RAM, if only for the eBooks (mostly digital copies of Hardcovers I bought new, so my conscience is clean).
You might want to take a look at Google’s Android Platform which is MUCH more open than the iPhone. As long as the user allows third party programs, you can install any Android program you like, without any pre-screening. And you can write applications rather easily since it’s all Java. However, I doubt you can access to the required interfaces in order to write something that can communicate with other devices around. All you’d really need to send is a link to a file in the {cloud}.