I was so proud of myself: I held out for an amazing four days before I gave in to the iPhone. Certainly, the fact that my original phone was a piece of junk was a lot of incentive. But what really sold me was the fact that the phone had Wi-Fi built-in and—more importantly—has a great browser. You see, the software development kit (SDK) for the iPhone is standard Dynamic HTML (DHTML) through the Web browser. So, you can use all the familiar HTML, Cascading Style Sheet (CSS), and Asynchronous JavaScript™ + XML (Ajax) front-end technologies in combination with your choice of back-end technology: PHP, Rails, Java™ technology—whatever you like.

After playing with my iPhone and doing all the usual stuff like calling people, playing with Google Maps, and listening to tunes with the iPod functionality, it was time to develop something specifically for the phone. So, the question becomes, what to develop?