Superfan and the iPhone

I finally got my iPhone yesterday – it had been on backorder – and it is the shizz.

The Trackgeek 2010 app was the first one I downloaded. It’s pretty good. The twitter feed, photos, videos, and schedules are great. The schedule section is especially well-made; it’s broken down into simple yet complete subdivisions, and each race or meet listing takes you straight to the competition’s official website.

Its drawback is the news feed, which is significantly short of regular reads. For example, it lacks Runner’s World’s Daily News, the single best online digest. Its sample pages showed Let’s Run among its news sources, but so far there’s nothing taken from there either. Basically: good framework, content could be better.

I find the general lack of track/running/Olympic apps puzzling. AT&T is one of the major sponsors for USATF as well as many other Olympic-sport NGBs and Universal Sports. The only reason to have AT&T wireless service is the iPhone. Developing iPhone apps isn’t terribly difficult—amateurs do it all the time. So why haven’t these entities simultaneously helped themselves and their sponsor in a cheap and easy way?

Even the really well-made websites out there, such as iaaf.org and runnersworld.com, don’t have mobile pages. I guarantee you one thing: if Tom Borish was still at the helm of a website, it would have a mobile page and an iPhone app. Essentially no one else with the resources to do something with it is as forward-thinking as he is, and that’s a huge drawback for our sport.