AppMakr Transforms App Store Landscape, Enables Anyone To Make Their Own iPhone App. Gagan Biyani raves about AppMakr, a product that allows anyone to make a simple RSS-based iPhone app for $199. The company will even submit the app to the App Store. (So, for instance, Biyani put together an app that aggregates all of MobileCrunch’s offerings.) The comments on the article are worth reading — one person says that “these types of startups definitely bridge the gap between idea people and actual phone developers,” and others consider how this will change the App Store.

JZ has recently pondered the iPad in a column in the Financial Times. Some excerpts of his thoughts…

First, he begins with a quick history of the subtle but massive shift between the Apple II and the iPhone:

In 1977, a 21-year-old Steve Jobs unveiled something the world had never seen before: a ready-to-program personal computer. After powering the machine up, proud Apple II owners were confronted with a cryptic blinking cursor, awaiting instructions.

The Extraordinaries Haiti Earthquake Support Center. A followup post on the Extraordinaries’ efforts to use ubiquitous human computing to help find missing people after the Haiti earthquake — a positive vision inspired by JZ’s nightmare scenario of crowdsourced secret police work. Did they succeed? “Yes and no”—but, as they detail, there’s obvious potential for future disaster relief.

Amazon Cracks Open the Kindle. Amazon is opening the Kindle to outside developers who can market their products in what sounds exactly like an App Store, down to the 70-30 revenue split and and light policing of apps. (One difference is that developers have to pay for wireless delivery.) It’s seeming like this is *the* model for the next few years. Speaking of which…