It occurred to me the other day that Belltower could be usefully generalised. Imagine if there was a Maemo package called "nearby" which provided an app which, given a set of items with coordinates and associated URLs, allowed you to find the nearest ones, find them on the map, get driving directions, bookmark them, and so on-- but it would be agnostic as to what the items actually were.

Then there could be other packages which installed, for example:

- a machine-readable list of all the Tube stations in London with their latitude and longitude, or
- all the petrol stations in a given region, or
- all the outlets of a given retailer in a given country (suppose Supermarket Foo wanted to have a N900 app to help people find their shops)...

and a .desktop file which launched the "nearby" app with that list as a parameter. And there'd be some amount of skinning possible so that you could have the icons looking like whatever it was you were looking for. Dozens of individually useful apps would become quite simple to create.

Belltower has almost all of the functionality needed for this already; it just needs a bit of generalising.