Digg for the iPhone

You can't buy the phone yet. But you can Digg it.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

What are iPhone applications going to look and feel like? We saw yesterday a simple shopping list application, and here's another one bound to be a big hit: Digg for the iPhone.

This "app," like others to come, is really just a Web site designed for the JavaScript in Safari, and for the iPhone's small screen. (It works in Firefox and IE, too). The interface employs the "fling" feature that Steve Jobs and the iPhone commercials show off: when you drag down a list with your fingertip (or mouse), and let go, it feels like the list has inertia. It keeps going for a little bit. It also "bounces" off the stops if you try to fling past the end of the list. It's very intuitive.

Wired's Cult of Mac blog says this interface is even better than the full Digg site. I think it's a little small for that, but it is a lot more fun to fling Digg than it is to just click.

The fact that iPhone apps sites can be built so fast is going to make it a great computing platform. In fact, what we thought was the product's great liability--a closed development environment that would keep the cellular network overloads happy--may turn out to be its greatest asset. By forcing development onto the browser, a million more products will bloom than if developers had to code new iPhone apps for the operating system beneath it.

[helio9000]

Nice try

This is not an application. It is a website formatted for the iPhone. That's your idea of bloom?

[alougher]

Interaction

It's only a phone application when it can interface with the phone's features, such as accessing your address book, GPS abilities etc. otherwise just as the previous poster saif, it's just a browser app.

[rafe]

Websites can be apps these days

Yes, it's "just" an interface to a Web site. But with the latest browser technologies, Web sites can be apps -- or at least act much like them. Look at Google Docs, JumpCut, XDrive, etc.

If you put the heavy lifting of "app" part on a server somewhere and make the front-end browser-based, you can do an awful lot. That's where this architecture will lead us. I think it's great.