An idea of useful iphone app took my mind for several hours. The idea is simple: notify users when there is a new refurbished product in Special Deals section of Apple Online Store.
The ideal is to push notifications to users, but this approach requires server side with a kind of spider. It’s more than a late night experiment target.
I spent a little time and made a prototype which parses products from apple.com. Of course it takes time to load html pages.
In common there may be a lot of apps with similar functionality, but you should know what Apple officially thinks about it. It will exactly violate section 3.3.7 of the iPhone SDK Agreement:
“Applications may not use any robot, spider, site search or other retrieval application or device to scrape, retrieve or index services provided by Apple or its licensors, or to collect information about users for any unauthorized purpose. ”.
There is even a real example of rejected app. But note, it’s a really useful app.
It’s strange feeling when good ideas is doomed, a little easier when it have not being developed yet.
Anyway I wish you quality ideas and dreams!