Initially I was under the impression that it uses the table row slideup/down animations while inserting/deleting new rows but I doubt if it’s doing that as it does it so fluidly even with thousands of items in the list (otherwise it would take a lot of time for the deletions/insertions to work).
Am I right in my assumption that it’s simply attaching a new instance of the News list at the bottom of the screen, shrinking the above one while the one at the bottom expands to fill up space?
UPDATE:
Please see this video of what I mean: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4960327/ReederAnim.mov
I can not tell you exactly how Silvio Rizzi made this, but as you see in the playback, a list view is added behind the shown list view, and the front list view fades out (.alpha = 0.0;) while the list view behind it expands its height per row.
When you desicate it frame by frame it becomes quite clear what he does, and it is really not that advanced. But I have to admit, with the white “milky” polished interface, it looks quite neat.
In addition, you can see that while animating, the background list view only renders the top 7 entries (hopefully calculated by dividing the view height with the average height of the cells shown) making the list view quick to load. Then afterwards, he can load an extended array of cells once you start scrolling, or in a background thread starting once the animation is complete.