In response to my earlier comment about Peeps being rejected for using a private API when they in fact rolled their own implementation of CoverFlow is to create my own implementation of CoverFlow.

FlowCover is licensed under a BSD-style license; feel free to use the code as a basis for your own iPhone application. There is some documentation as well.

I’m curious as to what Apple will do. It seems unreasonable for Apple to reject an application because it implements a user interface that looks like Apple’s other user interfaces on the grounds of “using a private API” while Google gets away with actually admitting in public of using a private API.

Which brings me to CoverFlow itself. I admit it’s a clever UI. I like CoverFlow; it makes browsing through my images really convenient. And it looks nice in iTunes. But let’s be real: implementing a CoverFlow like UI takes about an evening for someone who knows OpenGL–as I just demonstrated by spending an evening implementing a CoverFlow like UI. And I’m seeing CoverFlow-like UIs showing up in a number of places, along with discussions on how to implement something that looks like CoverFlow in other places. So closing up the CoverFlow API on the iPhone and shutting down people for independently implementing something that at best would take a few days (if you count stuff I haven’t done yet, like clicking on a cover to flip the view to a control panel) seems absurd to me.