Thursday promises to be an eventful day for the iPhone. That's when Apple's summons the tech press to its Cupertino headquarters to hear about the company's plans for the mobile device--particularly when it comes to applications built by third parties.

All signs point to Apple taking the wraps off a Software Development Kit (SDK) it had promised to deliver in February. And when Apple does grant developers access to building native applications for the iPhone, it will mark a significant new direction for the device since Apple first previewed the iPhone at the January 2007 Macworld Expo.

Back in the days before the iPhone's launch, Apple resisted calls to open the iPhone to third-party development, citing its desire to preserve the device's security and stability. By last summer's Worldwide Developer Conference, Apple offered developers an alternative--they could create Web-based applications that iPhone users would access through the device's built-in Safari browser.

While some software developers took Apple up on its Web-based offer, others built native iPhone apps anyway. The catch was that, to install these third-party apps, users had to "jailbreak" their iPhones--which works by intercepting the communication that is supposed to happen between the iPhone and iTunes--voiding their warranty and running the risk that future iPhone software updates would render their phone inoperable.

In October, Apple signaled an end to this cat-and-mouse game, promising to deliver an iPhone SDK in February. That SDK is likely to be a major focus on the conversation when Apple kicks things off at Thursday's event.

But the specifics of what Apple plans to say Thursday remain up in the air: How open will the iPhone be to third-party development? Will Apple place tight restrictions on third-party apps, as some reports have speculated, or will those restrictions only apply to paid apps, as others have claimed? And when third-party applications do appear--assuming some won't be unveiled on Thursday to kick-start development--what can we expect to see?

We won't know the answers to those first couple questions until Thursday, and it'll take a little while longer to see what kind of native apps emerge in the wake of Apple's likely SDK unveiling. But we don't have to wait to offer up our own wish-list of iPhone apps we want to see appear in native form.

We convened a panel of iPhone users--editorial director Jason Snell, senior news editor Jonathan Seff, associate editor Dan Moren, and senior editors Rob Griffiths, Dan Frakes, and Christopher Breen--and told them to come up with a list of the applications they want third-party developers to burn the midnight oil creating. They came up with 25 programs they want right now, which we've ranked in ascending order of urgency.

Did they miss a potential opportunity for third-party software development? Let us hear about it in the forum link below.

25. Amazon Kindle client/e-book reader

Amazon's Kindle e-book reader is half brilliant and half failure. The brilliant part is Amazon's Internet system, which allows you to easily search for and buy electronic books or periodicals and download them directly to the company's reader hardware. The failure part is the reader hardware itself, so poorly designed that it practically cries out for Apple to redesign it. Since Apple's not in the business of doing Amazon's work for it, how about this instead: Amazon takes the part of Kindle that's brilliant--its Internet and payment services--and sticks them on a piece of hardware with a design that's approximately 1 billion percent better than what Amazon's selling. Will people really buy and read books, magazines, and newspapers on their iPhones? If you're Amazon, it's worth a try.

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