Sometimes, the cleverest ideas and applications arise from these chance encounters, despite having only two days to come up with these applications.

Here are brief descriptions and a few screenshots of some of the nearly 40 applications developed or demo’d during iPhoneDevCamp 2. For a complete list, visit the iPhoneDevCamp 2 Web site.

Applications

• Converter: Karelia Software’s Dan Wood wrote this simple currency conversion application in 90 minutes.
• Fashion Season Collection: View photos and videos of haute couture fashion from the catwalk.
• Gifter: Demonstrates autofill in Web views in this gift-giving application.
• Heatmap Mobi: See what’s hot and what’s cold in your city.
• iRa: Easily the most impressive demo at iPhoneDevCamp, iRa takes mobile control and viewing of surveillance systems outside of the windowless, multi-monitor command center and puts them in the palm of your hand.

  

• Mapfoot: Find malls, stores and–most importantly–where you parked your car.
• My Emergency Info:Store and display emergency information.
• Quicktate: Stop listening and start reading your voicemail.
• Record-a-Call: Record and transcribe phone conversations.
• red:green: Have you iPhone voice your approval (green) or dismay (red) with this simple app.
• sStitch: A personal favorite, sStich provides citizens with the power to report disaster information. The developer showed how it was used to track a brush fire in San Diego.

  

• Substrate: Make pretty procedural wallpapers for your iPhone.

  

• Taxi!: With Safari, it can take over a dozen taps to find a nearby taxi company. With Taxi!, you’re only one tap away from hailing your next cab.

  

• Taxi Guide: With the Olympics just around the corner, you’ll need this app to help you browse Beijing hot spots and tell your taxi cab driver where to go … in Chinese, of course!

  

• WAn/WordPress Demo: Make your WordPress site look great on the iPhone.

Fun

• Free Kaleidoscope: An open source kaleidoscope application using OpenGL.
• Paddle Ball: Bounce the virtual ping-pong ball on your virtual paddle and don’t let it fall to the virtual ground!
• PushUp: Get in shape by having your iPhone count how many pushups you can do. Be sure to touch your nose to the screen to make it count!
• Tally Counter: A simple tally counter.

Development

• Gap: Open source development tool and framework for accessing features of the iPhone SDK from within HTML and JavaScript.
• TouchClipboard: Copy and paste clipboard frameworks for iPhone applications.
• GreasePocket: GreaseMonkey functionality on the iPhone.
• MagicTable: Build data-driven iPhone user interfaces with XML documents.
• REDACTEDDebugger: Debugging framework.
• TouchJSON / TouchSQL / TouchXML: Open source libraries and frameworks for handling RESTFUL JSON-based Web services, communicating to SQLite database and efficiently processing XML documents on the iPhone.

Music

• Harp: Multi-touch harp synthesizer with some unique user interface features.
• hum.itfor.us: A submission from a team in Colorado, hum.itfor.us allows songs to be identified by humming. It is similar in function to Midomi.
• iMusicMash: Retrieve lyrics and more information about songs in your iTunes Music Library by mashing them up with Last.fm and YouTube.

  

• MusicID: Identify music and retrieve additional information about songs.

Social and Gaming

• Bar Trivia: It’s trivia night, but this time with your friends over a Bonjour network.
• DudeZap: Send contacts from one iPhone to another.
• Fwerps: Feed and stroke your pet fwerp or it will become angry with you.
• Hot iPotato: Pass the iPotato to play an elimination game like musical chairs.
• iBoard: A Web-based micro-forum on the iPhone.
• irrSokoban: Move boxes around a maze into designated locations.
• LightBikes: Will you get to the MCP before your opponent gets to you?

  

• rspRoyale: A rock, paper, scissors game you can play with multiple iPhones.
• RPS: Another rock, paper, scissors game you can play with multiple iPhones.
• Tattle Talz: Find out if your friends are telling two truths or a lie on your iPhone.

  

• Wildcard: Free-form gaming surface (checkers, cards, chess, etc.) from the developer of Quicksilver.

  

When the iPhone was released in June, many developers were disappointed by the absence of an SDK for writing third-party applications on day one.

At D5, Steve Jobs explained to Walt Mossberg that Apple (AAPL) first needed to iron out some security issues before they would open up the device to outside developers:

We would like to solve this problem and if you could just be a little more patient with us, we’ll do it.”

–Steve Jobs at D5 on the availability of an iPhone SDK

Fast-forward to the first quarter of 2008, when Apple made good on its promise by releasing an early version of the iPhone SDK. The fruits of the patient developers’ labor was evident at the launch of the iTunes App Store, where 500 free or commercial applications were available to download onto the new iPhone 3G or the original iPhones running iPhone OS 2.0.

No longer were iPhone users confined to using Web applications running in Mobile Safari or resorting to jailbreaking their devices to use third-party programs.

The App Store made it dead simple for every iPhone user to duel their friends with PhoneSaber or satisfy their Dance Dance Revolution/Guitar Hero/Rock Band craving with Tap Tap Revenge, a game which recently celebrated its one millionth download.

At iPhoneDevCamp this year, there’s a greater and more palpable sense of excitement in the air than last year, and it’s reminding me of the time when I was writing applications for another Apple handheld product: the Newton.

While the green device from Apple was not a commercial success–it was surpassed in sales and popularity by the less-capable, yet smaller and more convenient Palm Pilot–the Newton nevertheless pioneered many features we now see perfected in the iPhone.

Fourteen years ago, the Newton could fax, send email and receive pages; the iPhone is a communications powerhouse with 3G/EDGE/Wi-Fi/Bluetooth.

Newton’s handwriting recognition was dramatically improved with Newton OS 2.0 in 1995; the iPhone has fantastic Chinese and Japanese character recognition.

Finally, the Newton promised a day when users everywhere had their own personal digital assistants in their pockets; today, millions of people have chosen their phone to be an iPhone.

Despite leading the Newton protest at Apple Computer in 1998, I admit that Jobs was right to cancel the Newton. He made the correct decision to focus the company’s efforts on Mac OS, and it’s paid off.

The iPhone, after all, is running a version of the same operating system powering today’s Macs. The release of the initial iPhone raised the bar significantly for mobile users tired of using the same-old devices from Palm, Microsoft, and Symbian.

At iPhoneDevCamp 2, the bar is rising even higher for native third-party applications. If you were excited about the first 1,000 apps, wait till you see what comes out this weekend!

Below are photos from Friday’s welcome reception at iPhoneDevCamp 2. For more information, visit the iPhoneDevCamp 2 web site.