iPhone's New Apps: Innovative Software Demoed at WWDC

Pangea Enigmo

Mac game developer Pangea Software showed off two titles at today's event. The first is Enigmo, a physics-based puzzle game. The title is completely touch-based, with drag and drop, zooming, panning, and rotating of puzzle pieces.

Pangea Cro-Mag Rally

The company's second game is Cro-Mag Rally, a 3D caveman racing game. Porting the game over was very easy, said Pangea's Brian Greenstone--getting each game playable took only about three days. The iPhone's tilt controls serve as your car's steering wheel. "That makes this game what it is," Greenstone said. It seems very much like the Nintendo Wii's motion-sensitive controls. Adding the accelerometer-based steering took "5 to 10 minutes." Both games will be on App Store at launch for $10.

Cow Music Band

The next demo featured the work of a solo developer, Mark Terry, from Cow Music. Terry works in the insurance industry in England. His application, called Band, is pretty amazing work for a solo developer: It includes a two-octave piano, a drum kit, and a 12-bar blues setting that quite literally lets you play 12-bar blues all on your own. Terry also demoed a bass-guitar window by playing the bass line from "Money" by Pink Floyd. Just mix all the different instruments together, and form your own music group. Band will be on the App Store in "a few weeks' time," said Terry, but he gave no information on pricing.

MLB.com

MLB.com has something for iPhone-toting baseball fans. We got a taste of its iPhone-native application from MLB.com's Jeremy Schoenherr. MLB.com "At Bat" offers features unavailable anywhere else. It will show you all the live games, and it will give you all the scores, who's on base, who's batting, and so on. It even has real-time video highlights from games, just as they're being played. The app will be available in the App Store at launch.

Modality

Medical applications figured prominently in today's WWDC keynote. Dr. S. Mark Williams showed a new medical program called Modality, an educational application to help med students learn anatomical information, replacing paper flash cards. Modality lets students zoom and pan across high-quality pictures, and tap on a Google Map-style pin icon to identify a body part. It will also quiz students on locating anatomical features. Within weeks of the App Store launching, Modality will have a dozen apps available, and many more by the end of the year.

MIMvista

MIMvista is a leading developer of innovative medical-imaging software. MIMvista's Mark Cain demonstrated its app for the audience. Displaying a CT scan and PET scan of a fictional patient named Johnny Appleseed, Cain fused the two images together and began switching the resulting image's orientation on the screen, showing the front, back, top, and other angles. Yep, it looks like Johnny has a lung tumor, unfortunately. Poor fella. The application also has a built-in movie mode that shows an animated model of the patient's body. The program will be out at the launch of the App Store.

Krull

The last third-party demo of the day came from Digital Legends Entertainment. Apple learned about this dev only last week. The company, based in Barcelona, started on the SDK only two weeks ago. "But when you get a look at the graphics, you'll forget you're looking at a phone and think you're looking at a dedicated gaming console." Xavier Carrillo Costa was here to give us a demo, in which a warrior jumped around on screen--it looked pretty cool. The game, called Krull, is expected to be released in September.

Of course, third-party apps weren't the only news at WWDC this year. Apple also unveiled hardware upgrades for the second-gen phone. Click here for more on that story.