Thanks to a generous invitation from Zakk Forchilli, I am a brand new user of Brightkite, “a location based social network.” As I’m not a heavy cell phone texter (yet), I’m not sure how much I’ll be using the service, but as I familiarized myself with Brightkite’s interface, I ran across their recently-released iPhone/iPod Touch interface.
Wow. This is how all iPhone web applications should look and function. Out of all the apps I’ve encountered, i.brightkite.com is perhaps the most attractive and most useful (with perhaps Socialthing! mobile coming in at second).
Here’s a screenshot provided through an iPhone emulator. It doesn’t really capture the true beauty of the app, but it does come close.
It does a phenomenal job of maintaining the look and feel of the iPhone’s native OS, but also pulls in bright and flashy colors and buttons to really round out the look.
It’s applications like these that really predict the power that mobile devices like the iPhone are capable of generating. Once the new applications, etc. are released in a few months, all of this will get even better.
One thought does strike me: it’s time that the industry standardized the web addresses for the iPhone versions of their pages; for instance, the discrepancy between i.brightkite.com and socialthing.com/iphone could make it tricky to find the iPhone version of a utility or determine whether or not one exists.
To all those that were involved in the creation of the Brightkite iPhone interface: congratulations and good work!
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