Dreaming: App store for Sync

[treeofliberty]

As my mind tends to wander (and wonder) during my 40-mile commute, I began thinking about the Arizona Dept of Transportation cameras that blanket the Phoenix freeway system. One can get on the ADOT web site and get a picture of traffic at dozens of spots on the freeway. From time to time, I peak at them before driving home, to see what I'm getting into.

 

<politics>

I don't approve of all this domestic spying our various governments are performing, of which I'm funding, adding insult to injury. :banghead:

</politics>

 

This lead me to dream about how cool it would be to integrate this into Sync, and be able to touch the Nav screen at a point on my route and bring up a happy snap from the traffic camera. All the connectivity is there. It's just an integration problem. If ADOT geotagged the images, one could even imagine a fairly general solution that wouldn't be ADOT specific. Any traffic camera that geotagged could be linked in.

 

That led me to think about the iPhone, Blackberry, Android, and Palm Pre. What if Microsoft published an API for the Sync system, which allowed third-party application developers to come up with all kinds of new applications for Sync, which could be purchaced from an app store, accessible from Sync. How many people have purchased iPhones because of the myriad of applications you can run on it? They're certainly not buying it for the AT&T phone service. This kind of buzz could really sell cars and reinvent the way onboard systems are built.

 

OK, this topic should have been put up in the Sync forum, but I like our corner of the forum better. And if by some means this idea gets legs and becomes reality, consider this my copyright notice. :happy feet: