We just launched a special version of Digg today intended to be browsed on an iPhone. It's available at digg.com/iphone but you've got to either be on an iPhone, in Webkit, or possibly on a Webkit-enabled device like some of the fancy Nokia phones.
It's really fun to be developing for the iPhone. First off, it's a welcome change to be developing for a single rendering engine... and a decent one at that. Plus, you've got the run of all of Webkit's features, including advanced pseudo-selectors, text-overflow ellipsis, and simple rounded corners in CSS. While I do enjoy making bulletproof designs in my normal web design, there's also some freedom in not having to consider text-resizing, extreme page resizing (you need to support 2 dimensions), and other hurdles when you're developing for the iPhone. Of course, we're still following standards pretty strictly, but not having to cope with the lowest common denominator (or even any rendering discrepancy) certainly makes things interesting — and fun!
Even more fun is developing specifically for the user input quirks of the iPhone. When your primary input device is a honkin' fat finger, it changes the way you think about links and buttons. Everything's got to be bigger... way bigger. The yellow digg box and Digg It button are about twice as large on the iPhone as on the normal website. I also made the clickable area of the Digg It button even larger than the button itself so if you click on the edge of it, you'll still get a press. You also have to make sure buttons aren't too close together so that you don't mash one when you intend to hit the other.
Joe (the Digg dev who coded the project) and I started from Joe Hewitt's excellent proof of concept and then adapted the javascript and the rest of the code. We're using jQuery (thanks to the jQuery team for their assistance) to render the sliding effects to mimic a 'real' iPhone application's functionality.
Joe and I threw this together over the weekend with Kevin's help storyboarding it. Good times were had. I'm really looking forward to messing around more with developing specifically for the iPhone. Fun fun fun. Can you tell I think it's fun?
UPDATE: One thing I forgot to mention is that page loading takes a long time on an iPhone. Actually sending and receiving a request over At&T's slow network (when you're not on wifi) is especially slow. So, we're actually doing one larger load to bring in both the story list and the contents of the stories. Then you've only got one request (and we made sure it wasn't huge) and you can browse the 10 stories on the page without loading again.
Update 2: Also see Joe's write-up on some of the technical aspects of the Digg iPhone version/
Comments
Antoine Bonnin - July 11, 2007 12:42 pm
It does sound like fun, so when will we see an iPhone version of Pownce :) ?
Sisir Koppaka - July 11, 2007 1:22 pm
The iPhone isn't available in my country, so I'd prefer if Pownce got some development work going on the mobile platform.
Matt - July 11, 2007 1:46 pm
I'd absolutely *love* to be able to develop in an all-Webkit environment. Just think; no hacks, pseudo-CSS3 support, standards compliance, beautiful font rendering, PNG alpha...-
Anyway, looking really slick Daniel. Very logical presentation, and iPhone-esque.
Judson - July 11, 2007 2:59 pm
Very nice! Thanks for building in the ability to digg things and read comments. This would be a little work on the database, but what about a way to mark stories you would like to look at later on a real computer? Not exactly a digg, but similar interface? Might be useful. :) Kudos to your team, it's getting good coverage in a lot of places!
Tortilla - July 11, 2007 3:20 pm
It looks great on my iPhone.
For Mac users without an iPhone, you can view it using iPhoney:
http://www.marketcircle.com/iphoney/
Nate Klaiber - July 11, 2007 5:52 pm
Looks nice on my iphone, thanks for taking the extra time to make it easier to browse digg on the phone.
@Tortilla
Or they could just their Safari Browser. iPhoney is simply a skin on top of Safari at this point - it isn't true to the resolution that you find on the iPhone, so why use that over Safari or a Webkit nightly?
Nate Klaiber - July 11, 2007 6:06 pm
On a side note, anyone else experience the Javascript to be a bit choppy? This is nothing against your application - just wondering if it is the way JS seems to work on the iPhone.
James C. - July 15, 2007 6:38 pm
Your iPhone version is completely pointless. All the links just go to the regular digg.com anyway. Why would I want to go to digg.com/iphone just to have any link I click on take me back to digg.com?
FataL - July 25, 2007 5:26 pm
Why you created version for iPhone? Better create version for all hanheld devices with URL like digg.com/hanheld or digg.com/mobile so all mobile users will benefit from this.