Posts Tagged by iphone app

One of the most highly anticipated apps for the Apple iPad was briefly made available to a few lucky and tech-savvy users who took advantage of what appears to have been a mistake. The Facebook app for the iPad was hidden inside an update for Facebook’s update to its own app for the Apple iPhone.

Apple made version 3.4.4 of Facebook for the iPhone available for free on its App Store on Friday. The updated version was released to address several issues and bugs reported by Facebook users when using the app on the popular Apple smart phone. No one expected to find an iPad version of Facebook concealed within. It is widely believed that developers included the iPad version as part of a universal installer that automatically detects the device it is intended for.

An iPad must first be “jailbroken” before it can run the secret Facebook app. Then the user must load version 3.4.4 of the iPhone app and manually change the UIDeviceFamily setting. A few iPad owners who were successful on running the Facebook app were very impressed with the HTML5 coding and GUI navigation system. According to first-hand accounts and screenshots posted online by a few lucky iPad owners, the Facebook app is fully optimized to take advantage of the revolutionary Apple tablet.

Online reports mention the existence of an innovative and efficient sidebar that simplifies navigation. Unlike Facebook for the iPhone, the iPad’s interface allows chat windows to remain open and persistent while the user browses around what’s happening in the rest of his social network.

Several technology news media outlets reported on the accidental event after a computer engineering student in Canada shared his discovery on the Internet social messaging service Twitter. As this release was accidental rather than official, access to Facebook from iPads has already been disabled. Facebook has not commented on the matter, although the company had recently hinted that they were working on several new exciting products.