[bengillies]

Indeed. Add to that the lack of camera access (among other things), and it leaves me wondering whether it's even possible to build something worthwhile.

Especially given Google's own statements saying that pictures/video are the (current) main use case (that they've discovered so far).

[jeffasinger]

I haven't read through the API super carefully, but I believe that you won't be able to write your own camera app, but you could certainly interact with the camera, by having the user share to a contact that you create/

[VLM]

So all is not lost, but the only app I could use under the TOS would probably be baconreader.

The unfortunate part about no money in the TOS means no geocaching.com and no ancestry.com apps and those would have been killer apps, well, at least for me.

Some geocaches give credit by uploading a pix of the locale and/or cache and/or contents and the gc.com folks never used to allow mobile/app access even just to coordinates unless you had a paid membership, so probably not even a "GC HUD" while searching.

As for ancestry and genealogy I've participated in quite a few cemetery surveys and assuming decent pix quality it would be awesome to "just stare at a headstone for 15 secs" and its magically snapped, geocoded, OCRed (good luck on 200 yr old stones, but at least a good first try?), and uploaded or something like that. Or if the GPS is good enough find an ancestors grave by gps, perhaps by someone else's geocoded pix upload, or at least get within 10 feet or so.

I've often thought that OCR with a highly limited dictionary downloaded from Ancestry would work better on worn headstones than generic OCR maybe even better than the mk1 eyeball. Maybe embed some HDR type ability and false color for the stones in the worst condition. Automated technology to pattern match stones as you walk by might work better than GPS at locating a specific stone, which is another whole weird area of research, like there is a stored pattern of rough color and size to pattern match against nearby my ancestors stones so it could successfully successively approximate.

Maybe when the apple iCompetitor (the iEye? iEye iEye Cap'n) comes out these ideas will be very profitable to some developer.