We have all seen the iPhone ads on TV, showing how the iPhone lets us flip through album covers with the flick of a finger. Apple calls these flipping album covers "Cover Flow," and it is a terrific, tactile way of searching through a music collection. Cover Flow makes the task of searching fun, more like flipping through LPs at a record store than browsing a boring list of .mp3 files. This is exactly the type of innovation that Apple is known for. Surprisingly, Apple did not create the Cover Flow interface for the iPhone - in fact, Apple didn't invent it at all!

Inspired by Apple's arrangement of multiple participants in a video chat, a blogger named Andrew Coulter proposed a method to visually browse his iTunes library, and made some images showing how it would look. In early 2005, CoverFlow emerged fully-formed, when Coulter and independent Mac developer Jonathan del Strother released it as a standalone application. They updated it until late 2006, when suddenly it appeared in iTunes 7, and they revealed that Apple had purchased all CoverFlow technology and intellectual property.

After what must certainly have been a long time in development, Apple previewed the sensational iPhone in January 2007, including flippable album covers. The Cover Flow interface (known to geeks as a "fliptych") is such a natural fit for the iPhone that it is almost hard to believe it was a relatively late addition.

What's next for Cover Flow? On the web, one of its original developers maintains a blog called "The Treehouse and the Cave" where he keeps a running list of Cover Flow inspired interfaces, which range from YouTube to web picture galleries. Of course Apple loves eye candy, so it should come as no surprise that they will be integrating Cover Flow-type browsing into the Finder. This means that in October (when Leopard is released) we'll be able to flip through our documents, pictures, videos, and folders. But here's the real question: will we be able to get any work done?