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Games
Tilt, described in programmer Joe Hewitt‘s blog:
…Christopher introduced me to a very talented video game designer, Nicole Lazzaro, who had an endless stream of ideas for games that would use the iPhone’s accelerometer. Nicole’s ideas quickly ran into the limitations of the phone, as we discovered that the browser doesn’t rotate when you hold it vertically upside down, nor is it possible to distinguish the two horizontal orientations. When we realized that her four-sided Tetris idea was not possible, we initially tried to compensate by adding in button pressing and other methods, but decided that we wanted to make a game that was very simple and used only the tilt sensor for input. Nicole’s philosophy is to focus on the emotional ride a player feels while being challenged and rewarded at just the right times, as opposed to just realistic graphics and long monotonous missions. From an engineer’s standpoint, I was overjoyed to focus on the psychological impact of my code instead of trying to build a technical or artistic masterpiece.
Hewitt also developed iUI: “As much as possible, iUI maps common HTML idioms to iPhone interface conventions.”
Meanwhile MacMost and iGiki both offer a number of iPhone optimized games.
Chat
JiveTalk, a web-based AIM/iChat, MSN, Yahoo!, GoogleTalk, ICQ, and Jabber client. The public alpha is online at iphone.beejive.com, though one imagines the company will eventually charge for use (they sell a chat client for Blackberry).
Gear Live offered instructions on how to cobble together IRC access on the iPhone with Colloquy on your Mac (you do use a Mac, don’t you?), the Colloquy web add-on, a bit of configuring, and a visit to http://YourIP:6667 on your iPhone.
I’ll probably tweak some Twitterers by categorizing them under “chat,” but we should at least be happy to see Hahlo and PocketTweets, two apps that make it east to Twitter via iPhone.
Remote Control
Telekinesis and Remote Buddy both make it easy to control your Mac with your iPhone, but Nate True’s WebVNC hack brings remote desktop support to the iPhone (Windows only).
Application Manager
How can we keep track of all these apps (and so many more not mentioned); how can we get to them quickly? AppMarks promises a sweet solution.