Many tech pundits have suggested, in defense of third-party applications on that Barack Obama of a mobile device known as iPhone, that its fabled killer app won’t come from Apple. Steve Jobs told the world last January that there would be no such support, then amended the pronouncement this week, asserting that, since the iPhone runs a fully functional web browser, that oh, of course you could write custom apps for the iPhone because you can write custom web apps.

Thusly we find ourselves. Already, we see people writing speculative web apps for the iPhone—not that speculation is necessarily a bad thing in this case, as the runtime environment is pretty much established (320×480, AJAX standards-compliant, touch interface), right?

Right. There’s no doubt that with this early activity already taking place before the device is even available, it is almost foregone that a strong community will build within the coming months. The iPhone will get its fair share of third party software, despite this awkward path to development. And somewhere in there will be the killer app, the real reason to get an iPhone. With one exception:

You won’t need an iPhone for it. If In fact, all you’ll need is something with at least a 320×480 touchscreen that can render standards-compliant pages. And while these devs may be targeting the specifics of Apple’s WebKit renderer, there’s nothing there that a little tweaking won’t fix.

Oops. If Apple had gone the SDK route and allowed iPhone development in Cocoa, the iPhone could have its first killer app all to itself. Perhaps this may yet happen. As it stands, though, anything that runs on the iPhone can also run on a Meizu, an FIC, or anything else with the specs to handle it.

Not that I’m complaining. It’s good for the market. It’s merely a bit ironic that a proprietary move on Apple’s part should result in the leveling of its own field.

I am not above admitting that it is likely due in part to a fear of commitment that, for my daily robot project, I chose not to register a domain including the word “daily.” In a coup of lukewarm, noncommittal dedication, I have safely set up shop under a domain with no reference to a supposed frequency of updates, leaving only the disjointed, easily mutable graphic headline of the site to offer a revocable promise of daily updates.

To be fair, my ultimate choice of domain was also motivated by a desire to keep the potential scope of the site open to future expansion. And while the words “Robot Project” may err on the side of cliché, they have, at least to me, in their evocation of childhood visions of Optimus Prime, a subtle ring of pleasant familiarity.

Over the past month, I have been readying a new project. It is one simple in objective, an exercise purely in creative visual form, perhaps with latent traces of narrative, all within a construct of regimen. Inspired by a delightfully demented project (whose delightfulness and dementedness I may only aspire to), I have resolved to initiate a daily series of original illustrations around a single, and I think happily versatile, theme: Robots.

Since the first of January, I have been adding one to the collection daily (allowing for occasional catch-up days), meanwhile planning their presentation, which I hope to have running in a basically functional form within a few days.

I frequent Illinois’ east-west corridor of Interstate 88 with a certain degree of frequency.

My spatial sense of the route has been shaped by maps (mostly Google), perhaps in significantly greater proportion than the actual act of driving it. My Place sense of the route has been shaped by the set-back structures that pass while driving. Despite this, mapping and interstate driving are similar in scope: both offer a broad, generally glancing look at the area they represent.

This week, as an exercise in experiential diversity, I chose instead to follow Route 38. 38 and 88 run parallelesque, both functionally east-west vessels, but I found the difference between them to cover far more than the mere differences in effective speed and net toll cost: The interstate was built for location. The roads were built for place.

Taking 38 through the hearts of several suburban communities reveals a much more colorful picture than the speed-and-distance-obscured structures to which the interstate offers a view. Light-governed intersections invite the eyes to break entirely from the road without threat of vehicular danger: Offbeat shops, tidy shopping districts, aged theaters, ornate Victorians, tasteless boxes; sprawl and tradition eye each other with uncertainty across the street. It is Americana, observed from the definitively American vantage of the interior of an automobile.

Of course, driving through a community is an admittedly shallow replacement for actually stopping, parking, walking, and experiencing.

Though the two are, to be fair, only one level of zoom apart.

Over the past week, the blog-reading public has seen the Wii remote’s accelerometric sensors intercepted and interpreted by a PC, and today the infrared interface has been cracked. Beyond moving a mouse pointer with the remote, though, the implications of this unintended interfacing could be far more profound that Nintendo seems to have anticipated.

The two pillars of the Wii’s interface technology, accelerometry and triangulation, have fallen. Everything is already, less than a month after release, in place for the Wiimote to become a completely usable PC peripheral. A $40 controller and a $20 bluetooth interface are the most anyone theoretically needs to leverage Wii technology—without a Wii.

The next twelve months for Nintendo may be quite unlike anything they had anticipated.

First of all, I think it’s safe to forget the idea of a Wii homebrew community ever arising now. Why hack or spring for a devkit if you already know how to program games for Windows? Why bother exploring the Hollywood and the Broadway if you already know OpenGL? And even more unsettling for Nintendo, why limit yourself to turbo-Gamecube graphics when you could be designing for a GeForce 7800?

This is where it really starts to get tricky—Hello World poses no threat to Nintendo, but what’s to stop a commercial game developer from releasing a PC game that requires a Wiimote? Nintendo can’t sue the developers for processing bluetooth packets—or can they? Nintendo obviously has a patent on the workings of the Wiimote; could they have also patented the process of decoding the remote’s emissions?

For a console whose landmark innovation is its haptic interface, the fact that one may now excise the console itself from its own ecosystem is striking. Perhaps the mantra “it’s the gameplay” is even more important than previously thought: Now that the Wiimote is no longer exclusive to its own console, the Wii can no longer rely on its unique controller. It must have quality platform exclusives a la Wii Sports and Raving Rabbids to survive.

Either way, I hope for Nintendo’s sake the Wiimote’s $40 USD MSRP accounts for a healthy margin. They might need it.

Wii would like to play.

Oh, so clever. But to label Nintendo’s new television (and, from the unedited length, presumably theatrical) ad as simply smart and entertaining is to miss a larger shift in Nintendo’s branding, perhaps even in the practice of Japanese-American marketing as a whole.

Nintendo, representative of much Japanese pop culture that has flourished in the States, has long imagined Westward. From the beginning, sending an Italian plumber to save a princess, one imprisoned in castles of European inspiration as opposed to ones following domestic style cues, it becomes apparent Shigeru Miyamoto and his creative associates long ago calculated the greater international potential of Westernized, or at least Westernesque franchises.

From Now you’re playing with power onward, Nintendo marketing has turned an almost consummately Westernized face to the US market, depicting Americans playing games in American settings. Yet, it’s a cultural choice I’ve become familiar with more recently in my own work: One of the clients my office works with is a Japanese-American furniture manufacturer and distributor with a number of Japanese businessmen in the US offices. When we’ve pitched publicity materials that play up their Japanese origins, they’ve been uneasy with the idea, preferring to look at home in the Western market, just as giants like Honda have.

Of course, American popular conceptions of Japan have been in motion for years. Mainstream American appeal of Anime, a medium in which some of the greatest commercial and critical successes have, contrary to patterns of the gaming industry, been distinctly Japanese, has paved the way for an American appreciation of, and, among Generation Y, obsession over, Japanese culture.

And now, enter the Wii.

For the first time in a major Nintendo ad, we actually see people unquestionably identified as Japanese. The music is obliquely Japanese. The new product is not displayed merely sitting atop the faux-cedar entertainment centers of kids or twentysomething hipsters. It’s introduced by formal Japanese ambassadors who arrive in a car designed for Tokyo parking. At the end of the ad, the Wii logotype itself even politely bows.

Nintendo has taken a new cultural step in marketing, fusing tradition and coolness in a way that I think could almost be termed “reverently postmodern.” It celebrates Japanese heritage and American diversity together.

For the sole purpose, lest we forget, of selling you a product.