Logitech Touch Mouse

My stupid little six years old idea is now a Logitech product on the iPhone.

My original implementation on ancient Palm PDAs/smartphones emulated a standard Bluetooth peripheral and it did not need special software running on the computer — similar apps on the iPhone work over WiFi and require starting up special server programs.  This is to be expected, since Palm supported third-party applications accessing the Bluetooth radio (they even provided a reasonably convenient & full-featured API for it), while Apple does not.  This is, at the end, a good thing: there is a limit to what an Apple-blessed app can do to an iPhone.  Buggy Palm applications could and did frequently crash the device.  There was a proliferation of third-party hacks that hooked into system internals and changed essential system behaviour, invariably destabilizing it.  The Treo was a great toy, but a horrible phone — I had to reset it multiple times per day and learned not to rely on it for anything important.  I can’t even remember when I last rebooted my iPhone.

The royalty checks I received for BlueRemote over all these years have paid back the price of the development kit (i.e., my Tungsten T2 and Treo 650), with perhaps just a little extra.  I believe this was considered a success back then, considering that I did not do any marketing whatsoever.   BlueRemote’s price was $14, with (AFAICR) 60% going to Motricity’s pockets.  For contrast, the going price for similar software in the App Store is 1$, with 70% going to the developer.  (The Logitech app is for promoting their hardware, so it’s free.)  The fact that it still seems worthwhile for one-man teams to produce software for 0.7$ a pop is a testament to the App Store’s success.

Once in a while, I still get an email complaining that BlueRemote does not work on the lastest generation of Palm OS devices, with their fancy new Bluetooth chips. It would be mildly amusing to fix this at some point and release an update.