Joe Walnes is a great open source developer who works on mobile fun in the Google London office. He just released a new iPhone interface for Picasa:

I had a look around some websites and I really liked how they looked on the iPhone. I could get to everything I needed. I went to picasaweb.google.com but it didn’t quite feel right. It was using some very cool AJAXy features, but these were designed with a desktop web-browsing experience in mind. So the next day I had a go at creating a new interface for Picasa Web, designed for the iPhone.

Today, I’m happy to tell you that we’ve just released this new iPhone interface for Picasa. After you go to Picasa on your iPhone and log in, you can quickly see all your albums that you’ve uploaded to Picasa Web. If you click on any of the albums, you can get a full view of your picture with comments from your friends. Or you can click on Slideshow, sit back and watch the pictures scroll. You can also search for photos in your album or through community photos. Finally, with one of my favorite features, you can view your friends’ albums through favorites.

If you have gone to google.com on your iPhone recently you have seen a different interface. The iPhone specific site has been optimized for speed and fluidity. When we first got to see this work internally at Google we were all impressed at how Steve Kanefsky was able to make it seem so fast and smooth thanks to lots of caching and smart Ajax work. In fact, the searching itself uses APIs that you can use yourself, the Ajax Search APIs.

This interface is more than just search. Just as the Facebook application is so good due to the fact that Joe tried hard to think about what you would want to do on the phone interface (get info quickly versus browsing around FB endlessly), the same happens here. Core actions across Google are available. A quick look at your email, your calendar, your feeds, and much more.

Here is what Steve said about the project:

We all know that using the web on mobile phones can be a challenge sometimes. Compared to our personal computers, the screens are smaller, it’s more difficult to navigate and enter text, the network connections are slower, and the browsers lack many of the features we’ve become accustomed to. I deal with this every day as both a developer and a user of mobile web applications. So you can imagine how excited I was when the iPhone launched with a large touch screen, Wi-Fi, and a full-blown Safari web browser!

I started thinking about how to use AJAX technology to improve Google on the iPhone. I set out to create an application that would preload my favorite Google products and allow me to switch between them instantly. I wanted web results as well as image, local, and news results without having to repeat my search. I wanted to check Gmail and my news feeds in Google Reader without having to load a new page every time. I also wanted Google Suggest to save me time typing queries on the virtual keyboard.

I created a prototype and showed it to some fellow Googlers. After that, things started moving pretty quickly. A few weeks (and a few gallons of mint tea) later, I had an improved version which Googlers throughout the company were using on their iPhones (it works great on the iPod Touch too). Now we want to share it with everyone.

iPhone applications aren’t only for cool consumer apps. We are going to see the enterprise world get into the action, and we see one cross over with the release of an iPhone application from Fidelity. The application looks like a widget that gets you simple market data, and also ties in news.

On your iPhone? If so, check it in action!