Missing on the iPhone

1. A good memo application capable of sorting memos according to category, and available on iPhone, Mac, and PC. C'mon, folks. Palm did this in 1996, twelve years ago. This isn't brain surgery. Right now, the closest is Evernote, which has the disadvantage of putting all your memos on a central server somewhere and if that central server goes down, your notes disappear into a poof of blue smoke.
2. A conduit mechanism for syncing application data between the Mac and the iPhone. Right now, any data you enter into an application other than one of the Official Apple-Written Applications basically cannot be accessed on the Mac side. (Substitute "PC" for "Mac" if that's your poison).
3. A decent TODO program that syncs with the iCal TODO list and/or Exchange TODO lists. Needs conduit mechanism above. Preferably has categories too so I can separate out business TODO's from personal TODO's and have them sync to different places (e.g. business TODO's syncing with Exchange, personal TODO's syncing with my iCal TODO list).
4. Cut-and-paste between applications. Doh. Even Windoze Mobile can do cut-and-paste between applications.
5. The ability to sync via Bluetooth and WIFI as well as via USB cable.

What's most irritating is the fact that the iPhone still can't do some things that the Palm could do ten years ago, like cut-and-paste, TODO and categorized/synced memos, etc. Part of this is because Apple has no conduit mechanisms so it's impossible for a third party to make them work -- e.g., there's no way to make TODO's and memos sync via iTunes because Apple has no sync mechanism. The mechanisms others have used, e.g. Evernote, rely on klunky things like a third-party proxy service.

Hopefully Apple will eventually resolve these problems. For now, I'm going to go download Apple's development kit and see if I can whip up some applications to fill some of these gaps. On the Mac/PC side, I'll probably whip up a quicky XML-RPC program in Python to serve as a "synchronization server" for individual applications, but, alas, it's impossible to have a global sync mechanism this way because of the way Apple sandboxes the applications (each runs in a chrooted jail, meaning that if I had a 'conduit sync' application it still wouldn't be able to access data belonging to other applications in order to sync with the Mac/PC/Linux). Application-by-application sync sucks big rocks but that's all that's possible until Apple gets their head out of their asses... grrr!

-- Badtux the Geeky Penguin