Shovelling some stories with the Digg iPhone app

Since the dawn of Apple's mobile marketplace, app makers far and wide have been grinding their teeth in frustration towards Digg's limited developer API. The most any iPhone enthusiast has been able to achieve with their application so far is the ability to list and bury stories from the social service, a handicap strong enough to banish Digg apps from most peoples phones full-stop. But now, rocking a new API and the will to go mobile, who should come up with the next generation of story shoveling application but the pioneers of social news themselves. Here's Digg for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Design & Interface

At first glance, the Digg designers have done themselves proud. The interface is clean and controlled with plenty of space for stories to populate the screen. The blue icon to the right of each listing expands a story to reveal it's thumbnail, source and description, as well as three well placed action buttons. Tap the Digg count to go to it's respective Digg page, or the story itself to jump straight to the source. Either way, you'll notice a gorgeous green bar appear at the bottom of the display which allows users to digg, bury, share via Twitter or Facebook, and save stories.

Killer Feature

One of the great features of this App is the latter. Saving submissions on the fly is an invaluable resource when it comes to catching up with top stories when pressed for time. In just a few seconds a user can scroll through any given category, tapping links they want to check out later. The Digg app then tags the user's selection in the 'saved stories' inbox, which can be returned to at a later time. Disappointingly this doesn't work offline, so you can't return to your chosen articles in the pub or when caught out by your carrier.

So how does it weigh up?

In general the app itself is pretty easy to use. Intuitive menus and logical icons allow you to Digg elegantly with ease and although stability doesn't seem to be this application's strong point, we're righting this off to our early adoption.

But what about the competition? As of yet, no other developers have churned out apps that take advantage of this new API, although we do know a very passionate Loowa LLC are working to get Shovel 3.0 out soon and Dative Studio's Diggle is set to follow suit.

The Verdict 

It's gotta' be said, for a first attempt we're pretty impressed! Sure, a minor performance tweak and general speed boost wouldn't go amiss, but if you can stand the comedic commenters and stuff like this makes you laugh, then Digg's flaming hot iPhone rendition most certainly deserves some serious real estate on your homescreen. Move over NewsRack, iPhone news is about to go social!