The Thing About iPhone 2.0 Apps is…
While all of the hype around iPhone’s 2.0 software and how it is likely going to save the rainforests and prevent little old ladies from dying and whatnot is well-deserved, in my awesome opinion, their does seem to be one slight bummer with what I see with the apps thus far: they’re very limited in what they can do to the OS itself.
Sure, apps can hook into the location services or let you mess with your pictures or record audio or a ton of other, fun, amazing, extremely cool things. But they don’t seem to be, for example, able to modify your desktop’s appearance or functionality. One really nice addition would be an application that can list your day’s agenda on the “Slide to Unlock” screen, so that right off the bat you could see any appointments you have or even to do list items in one of the 5,000,000 1/2 to do list apps that were released with the launch of the App Store.
Also, since apps can’t currently run in the background, you can’t get updates from these to do list-type applications, so setting due dates for them isn’t as useful as it could be. Perhaps this will be resolved in September when Apple unleashes its little updater service that replaces the need for apps to run in the background.