Monday, July 25, 2011

In Hiding

The lack of an official Facebook app for iPad is one huge glaring fly in the ointment. Zuck has said that the iPad is large enough to use the website, but there are big downsides to doing that, including the fact that you cannot upload photos.
 
Then along came a very solid rumor that Facebook has been working on an iPad app for more than a year.
 
And yesterday someone uncovered a very interesting secret. When the FB iPhone app was updated this week, a special surprise was hidden inside. Turns out the code for a fully-functioning iPad Facebook app is hidden inside the iPhone app. It's there, but it's turned off. The compu-geek who discovered this figured out how to "turn the switch" and make it run on a jail broken iPad and the shot above was taken from that app.
 
What does this mean? Well, for one it means Facebook is about to drop their long-awaited Facebook app on us. And the fact that the code is rolled up inside the iPhone app means the app will be a "universal binary", which is Apple's way of making one app run on two or more different devices. You know, the ones with the "+" sign on them in the app store.
 
I for one cannot wait, because the third-party Facebook apps, all million of them, all have deep flaws. And from what the Tech Crunch guys are saying, this hidden FB app is feature-complete and very well built.

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