What do you want an iPhone library to do for you?

Question

I'm an undergraduate university student who also writes iPhone applications. Next year I'm expected to do a final project, something that lasts the full year and involves a fair bit of software engineering.

My original plan was to write an object-relational wrapper around SQLite for the iPhone (or rather, to massively clean up and extend one I already have) and ultimately release it as open source. Unfortunately, with Core Data being added to iPhone OS 3.0, that's no longer really necessary. (At least, that's how it seems to me; any opinions on this?)

However, I'd still like to do a useful, technically interesting iPhone-related project next year. So here's my question: what do developers need? What sort of problems do you encounter in your apps which seem like they could be handled by some sort of library or framework? My focus is generally more on utility, productivity, and communication apps than games. And since I'm proposing this to a university, something that's either theoretically interesting or attractive to potential students would be preferred. And of course, it'll need to be something that they haven't added to the new version of iPhone OS.

Answer 1

A general purpose framework to communicate with a particular iphone from any application with internet connectivity. iphone apps are great, but so much more can be delivered with serivces from the web - so some sort of communications would be nice.

Make some sort of API that can be used to talk to iphone from other connected applications - either web services or desktop, etc.

Answer 2

It's in the early stages, but a bunch of scientifically-minded Cocoa developers (headed by Drew McCormack) have joined together to start a BSD-licensed data charting / plotting / visualization framework called Core Plot (mailing list here). This framework is cross-platform between Mac and iPhone, relying on Core Animation for rendering.

While you wouldn't be starting your own project fresh, contributing to this open source framework would be technically challenging and I believe that the framework will have far-reaching applications. I'm sure that the university would be impressed by the potential scientific and educational uses of such a framework.

Answer 3

I'd like to see a framework that abstracts the interface to various social networking sites. Having a standard API to send updates and post pictures to MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, Picassa, Blogger, Twitter, and other services would be very useful.

Answer 4

A library that provides a very simple API that would enable any app to act as an OAuth consumer would be incredible! It could be used to enable data access against hundreds of OAuth-enabled data APIs all over the web, including those of Google, MySpace, Twitter, Yahoo, Flickr, etc. Imagine how many thousands of additional applications you could enable other developers to build with ease.

Your code could be included in pretty much every worthwhile iPhone app that any future developer writes!

Answer 5

I ended up having to go in a different direction due to the rules of the project, but I'll keep these in mind as possibilities for future, non-university work. Thanks, everyone!