Have the iPhone use the gps data... upload where I was a minute ago and where I am now. Figure out my speed and route. Use the data to tell other RadaR users which route is best. It's worth $20 a month if you live in a place with traffic jams. It's a natural monopoly--once someone figures it out, why wouldn't everyone want to use the market leader?

Here's an easier one that you could probably sell as well. I type in a phone number and enter a time. Record a message and press go. I can cue up a bunch of messages that are based on time. I can have groups get the message I record, at the time I want them to get it.

The fix for pricing too low is really simple: raise your prices. Most $0.99 apps should become $9.99, $4.99 apps should become $14.99, and so on. With a $9.99 app, you’d make $7 per copy and at 16 copies per day, you’d make about $40,000/year. That’s not a great income, but that could potentially support one iPhone product being developed in some Iowan’s wheat field.

iPhone apps are typically much smaller and more focused than desktop apps and as such, should be priced accordingly. In addition, you need to take into account the much larger market that you’re dealing with here… Apple is selling well over 10,000 iPhones per day and these are all potential new customers, plus all the existing iPhone owners and iPod touch sales.

Generally, I use Habits to help with Sharpen the Saw type of tasks -- things I want to make sure I do every once in a while, but not necessarily at a specific time. Also, unlike a recurring event in a calendar, I can record how well I do with them (if I do them late, early, or skip them).

[...] crash as early as possible. It's no fun to figure out a crash bug once the culprit function has already returned. You really want the root cause somewhere on the call stack when it's detected.

1. Declare all of your object pointer @properties as retain unless you have a really good reason not to. Then the setter that is generated will automatically call retain when you assign. When you reassign, it knows to call release on the old value.
2. In your dealloc, assign all of your @properties to nil. This has the effect of calling release on the current values if they are not already nil.
3. alloc returns an object with a reference count of 1 -- so you have to balance with a release.
4. If you alloc, then you should try to release in that same function. To retain the value, assign it to something that retains. Exceptions are if you are a factory function that is returning a value up to be retained by the caller.
5. Obviously, each retain call needs a release.
6. Built-in convenience functions return objects that are autoreleased. That means you shouldn't call release on them -- the framework will call release at some point (they are registered in an autorelease pool that that is serviced when you return back to the framework). If you created the object without an alloc/init pair, you don't need to call release unless the docs say you do (but they probably don't)
7. Check all of your work with the leak detector. Also, if you crash, you're probably doing it wrong -- I will have more to say on that soon.

1. Go enroll in the iPhone developer program before you start. Yeah, I know -- it's 99 bucks. But if you have an idea and a reasonable chance of doing it, just take the plunge. I joined after I finished, and that caused a lot of delays -- I could have been completing the other necessary steps in parallel.
2. As soon as you're in, go get your application contracts going. If you want to make paid applications, you have to give Apple your tax and bank information. Again, it takes some time to get approved, so start early.
3. If you don't know Objective-C -- don't worry, that's the easy part. The primer on the iPhone developer site should be good enough if you know C/C++.
4. For Cocoa Touch, I recommend Erica Sadun's iPhone Developer's Cookbook. The chapter on coverflow is worth the price of the book, but everything else is there too (navigation, touch, location, contacts, etc)
5. I also highly recommend iCodeBlog. Once you have some basic knowledge of the framework, check out the to-do application tutorial.