Facebook App for iPhone

Jay takes a look at the new version of the Facebook app for the iPhone.

Hi, I am Jay Goldman and you are watching Mr. Mobile on butterscotch.com. Today, I look at the new Facebook app for iPhone. Now, this has been a non-uncontroversial release as of course nothing with Facebook is. There are some people out there who prefer the old version of it. It is kind of a radical new departure from a user interface perspective but they are wrong. This is a much better application. You’re definitely going to enjoy if you’re a Facebook user because it gives you access to all of the information that you’re looking for but not only that, it actually works which means that you can drill right down into the things that you’re getting notified about whereas in the old version, you often sort of found yourself saying, ”I wonder what photo I was added to but I can’t get to it” or “Which status somebody had commented on but I couldn’t see it.” With the new version, you can see all of that kind of stuff and you’ve got this great new grid view that gives you quick access to all of the areas of Facebook that you’re likely to be looking for. The grid view kind of works like the launcher on your iPhone already. So, if you want to rearrange any of the icons that are on here, you can do that just by holding your finger down and then until they start doing the jiggly little dance that the iPhone launcher does. And then of course, you can just drag them around to reposition them. You’ve got three screens that you can put them on. And when you’re done, you just type done in the top left corner. You can also add your own bookmarks. So, if there are profiles of particular friends that you visit on a regular basis or of fan pages that you’re a big fan of, you can tap on the plus button in the top and that will let you do a search through your friends or by tapping on pages at the bottom right side through pages that you’re a fan off. And then you can put those directly onto your launcher here and have access to them at one tap. The common areas of Facebook that you’ll find here include of course things like your news feed, your profile, your friends, your inbox for messages, events in your calendar and that sort of stuff. Right now, there isn’t or doesn’t seem to be a way for third party applications to get a presence on this. That may change with the future release of it. That may be the direction that they’re heading in. But right now, it’s all of Facebook’s major applications and not any of your third party ones. You also get this blue bar along the bottom which is your notifications. Tap on that to actually bring your notifications up and you can see all of them directly from here. You can scroll through them just by swiping your finger, hit Done to go back to your launcher. When you’re in any of the applications; so for example, your inbox or your profile, you’ll see a grid button up in the top left corner, tapping that will take you back out to the grid at any time. And of course you got a search box at the top. That works much like search on Facebook itself. And that gives you for full access to the live searching that Facebook is recently introduced, so typing search and they will bring up things that match on it. Again, it’s a free upgrade. You can find it in the app store or you can find the download link in the show notes on butterscotch.com. I am Jay Goldman. This has been Mr. Mobile. Thanks for watching. Catch you next time.