New iPhone version of Digg

Like many other interesting projects the Digg iPhone project started with a conversation over a few beers and a challenge: code it in 48 hours and Kevin would give me a free iPhone. Being the unabashed Apple fanboy I am and, also, being a self-respecting coder I set out to create Digg for the iPhone.  After spending a short time white boarding the application, Daniel mocked up the design and I set off to code it.

Technically speaking, it’s no revolutionary application and I didn’t spend the entire 48 hours working on the application. I did, of course, find time to go see Transformers (awesome) over the weekend. The JavaScript was borrowed from Joe Hewitt and adapted a bit using jQuery. The application iteself is based on our API using the Services_Digg PEAR package I maintain. I’ve been talking with the jQuery team about some limitation in the animations and plan on packaging up a more robust iPhone JavaScript library based on jQuery sometime in the near future (hopefully).

Yesterday Kevin announced the iPhone application and Daniel Burka, our designer at Digg, has covered the details about designing for the iPhone. So far the response to the application has been positive. It was fun and I’m glad everyone is enjoying it. I know I did while riding the bus to work today.

And to answer everyone’s questions. I got an 8GB version last night, the keyboard is interesting, it’s breathtakingly gorgeous and I’ll write YAiPR (Yet Another iPhone Review) soon.

jQuery Verification Plugin

I’ve created my very first jQuery plugin. It’s fairly simple in that it simply verifies an input field’s value via AJAX after a short delay from the key up event handler. Put more simply, you can verify emails, URL’s, usernames, etc. directly as the user is typing them into the input box.


$(document).ready(function() {
    url = '/verify.php';
    options = {
         verifying  : "urlVerifying",
         valid      : "urlValid",
         invalid    : "urlInvalid"
    };
    $('#email').verify(url, option);
)} 

This will, after a short delay, verify the value of the input with id="email". The script passes the value to the URI as /verify.php?value=foobar@example.com. The script should then echo 1 for a valid value or 0 for an invalid value. See the example for more information.

Download jQuery Verification 0.0.1