Swearch

Swearch is a great new iPhone app for using a variety of search engines quickly. Pick a search engine to use (Google, Twitter, Wikipedia, or Flickr), enter a search term, and quickly get the iPhone-optimized search results displayed full-screen. The current search engine is displayed in a beautiful full-screen UI; to navigate between them, you can swipe left and right to get between each search engine. And it's silky smooth and super fast on your iPhone, with Retina-optimized graphics for your iPhone 4.

Oh, and there's one other thing. It's a web app. Wait, don't close the tab! Please hear me out. Or, if you're going to close the tab anyway, at least give it a quick try.

The app uses HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript to give you a fantastic user experience, the number one priority when building this app. It runs at 60 frames per second on an iPhone 4, even with animating elements in the background (protip: check out the background on the Twitter page). The scrolling has been tuned over several weeks of fiddling with horizontal iPhone paging. The end result: it feels more native than any iPhone web app I've ever used, and my testers have had similar acclaims.

That's not to say there aren't inconsistencies. Some things are simply not possible to work around, such as an issue where the underlying web page scrolls automatically when the search field is tapped. I'll be filing bugs with Apple to hopefully get these bugs fixed, and in a future blog post I'll be talking about what I tried to do to work around them.

There are some more technical features that are in Swearch that you won't really notice, but will make the application feel way better. The big example of this is the use of the HTML5 Offline Application Cache. The first time you load the app, it will download all of the code and graphics used to build the app and save them on your phone. The next time you launch the app, it will only take a second or two to reload the app, no matter how bad your cell signal is. This is usually used to make your app run when there is no network connection, but since that really doesn't make sense for this kind of app, I just use it to make the app launch super fast. If I ever update the app, your phone will automatically load the update

Why not make it an App Store app? There are a few reasons. As I mentioned before, one of the goals was to build a web app which had as good a user experience as possible. I could've released this a month ago, with a less-than-perfect scrolling interface, but that just didn't feel right, and wasn't acceptable. Second, I want to add new features quickly. The source code is fairly simple, so I can build in new features, new search engines, and new interactions quickly. Third, I'd like to do some things that the App Store really doesn't allow. These are some future looking features I want to build soon.

To run Swearch, open this link on your iPhone, and add it to your home screen. It is completely free forever, will never have ads, and you don't need to register for an account.

The application source has been made available on GitHub. It includes instructions for getting the application set up on your server (including setting up the HTML Offline Application Cache). I'll accept patches for fixes and features at my discretion. It has been made available under a BSD license, and you can use the source code however you want. I encourage devs to use this as an example of how to build a great iPhone web application. There are a few great web apps out there, but certainly not enough.

Right now the application is limited to the iPhone. I want to get it running on iPad, Android, and WebOS soon (the last two are more difficult, as I don't have hardware for it, but feel free to fork the project or shoot me a comment/email if you know a fix).

For their efforts in testing and feedback, I want to say thanks to every one of the people who tested Swearch in its earlier forms. I'd especially like to thank:

• Josh Helfferich (@Digeratii)
• Federico Viticci (@viticci)
• Austin Sarner (@austinsarner)
• Jeremy Grosser (@synack)
• Angelo DiNardi (@adinardi)

Please give Swearch a try. I think that you'll love it, and that it will change the way you make web searches on iPhone.

tl;dr: Swearch is a search engine app for iPhone with an amazing UI. And it's an open-source web app. It's free forever, so just open http://swearch.me/ on your iPhone and add it to your home screen.