Apple's Scott Forstall, VP of iPhone Software, took the opportunity of today's Roadmap Event to showcase five new third-party apps. It has been said many times that the iPhone runs the very same OS X as can be found on the Macintosh, but today's demonstrations have proven that the power of the operating system is truly present within the handset. In addition to that, Apple flaunted the ease of bringing full-powered desktop-class applications to the iPhone using its XTools-based iPhone SDK. First to debut was the much-anticipated game Spore. Yes, Spore - the game which allows one to conquer the universe starting their existence as a measly single-cell organism - has been ported to the iPhone. It is allegedly somewhat stripped down, and performance was a little choppy, but it's still Spore! On top of that, development time was stated to be about two weeks. This certainly bodes well for the ease of porting software to the iPhone. Second on the roster was salesforce.com's SalesForce. Sure it's not a performance blockbuster, but it does have the ability to access up-to-the-minute sales data on the fly, natively build charts and graphs, and interact with certain iPhone features like Google Maps. Third to be showcased was AOL's popular instant messaging application, AIM. The iPhone version is capable of managing multiple conversations simultaneously, allowing a user to switch between them by "swiping." The app even allows a user to update their away message and buddy icon, the latter of which chooses from photos stored on the iPhone itself. AIM's development took a shockingly short 5 days to reach a working state. The fourth application shown was a medical app called Epocrates. Built on an SQLite database, the program allows one to find information on different medications or even search for pills based on color, shape and size. Again, it wasn't a performance app, but rather showed off the iPhone's ability to interact with a database. The final preview shown was for Super Monkey Ball. The Sega game, which features a monkey rolling around inside a ball, uses the iPhone's unique accelerometer to navigate through levels. The surprising part is that Sega actually had to fly in a designer to improve the game's graphics to match the iPhone's capabilities! Eye-witnesses stated that the art was beautiful and the framerates were smooth. (Smooth-running & beautiful 3D games... are we talking about the same Apple, here?) All-in-all, Apple seemed to do an impressive job flaunting the potential capabilities of the iPhone and the ease of their new SDK. They have certainly piqued interest in a large number of developers (evidenced by the crashing of Apple's developer website following today's announcements) and have opened the door to what seems to be transforming into a more and more mainstream platform.

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