Suggestion to Apple: Open the Simulator

So yesterday I twittered about how there are a few iPhone applications that I would actually like to migrate back to Mac desktop versions.  The two I mentioned at the time were TV Forecast and Tweetie.  That got me thinking, very naively I might add, the iPhone SDK has a simulator in it so why not just download the SDK and fire up the simulator and run the apps on my Mac?

As it turns out simulator != emulator. The iPhone's CPU is based on the ARM architecture where as my Macbook Pro's CPU is based, essentially, on the i386 or x86 architecture. Which means of course that applications in the iTunes store compiled for the iPhone won't run in the simulator because when you compile an application to run in the simulator Xcode creates an x86 binary. In addition to which I'm sure there's also various levels of DRM that would thwart my plan as well.  However this little adventure got me thinking.

What if Apple were to create an actual emulator for the iPhone that came with iTunes? One advantage of this would be that Apple could implement a trial system for applications. Allow me to download an application and run it on my Mac to try it out.  If it were up to me I would say give unlimited use on the Mac side and then I have to actually buy the application in order to transfer it to the iPhone but I can see developers might not be down with that idea so Apple could just give them the opportunity to set the trial period. Buying the application would entitle the user to unlimited use on both their iPhone and in the simulator. 

All of this has the added advantage of killing two birds with one stone in allowing me to run the iPhone apps I want on my Mac and addressing one of the adding one of the more requested features to the iPhone store, trials. So get cracking apple or at least hire me to be product designer on all this...k, thanks.