What technique is Facebook using to generate their news feed in their iPhone application?

Question

I noticed a long time ago (when facebook updated their application after the new profiles were released) that the news feed and various other parts of the application are not being generated using your typical table views and cells. I believe this for a few reasons.

First they've been able to update certain design elements on-the-fly without me having to update it from the app store. Another example is every now and then when the app is loading and taking longer than expected, I've been able to scroll around (up, down, left and right) and see weird shadows that looks like are coming from a uiwebview (can't get a screenshot right now). And lastly, every now and then the "css" will not load right away and I'll get this:

Does anybody have any insight on what they're doing to do this? I'm very familiar with their open source framework Three20, but don't think there is anything special in there that is letting them do this. It seems like they're generating the HTML in a UIWebView, but I'm not entirely sure.

What do you all think? The application I'm building would benefit greatly with the whatever technique they're using. Updating and design the table view and cells can be quite time consuming.

Answer 1

Have a look at html-5 frameworks like sencha and jquery for generating a mobile style touch interface in web pages. Facebook may be using UIWebView's with nested html-5 elements to provide touch /mobile style table UI's etc.

Answer 2

version 4.0 of the Facbook is basically a login page and one big UIWebView on top of http://touch.facebook.com/.

You can use your desktop browser to check our the source code of the touch site if you're interested in the elements Facebook used in their touch version.