Facebook 3.1 Arrives for iPhone. Brings Push Notifications and Contact Sync.

In August of last year, we saw Facebook for iPhone get a complete overhaul, with the firm introducing us to version 3.0. Courtesy of software developer Joe Hewitt, the update brought an entirely different UI to the table, a user interface which thought more specifically about the user in general, and the actions and features within Facebook. For the most part the update was well received, with the likes of Mashable calling it an “absolutely essential” upgrade for all users of the service. It certainly wasn’t ‘complete’ though. Far from it. In fact, there were many glaring omissions including the likes of built-in support for Apple’s Push Notification Service, contact sync with the iPhone OS address book app and the ability to immediately playback Facebook uploaded videos from the app itself.

Today though, Facebook has debuted version 3.1, the next major release to the software. Thankfully, this version adds full support for Apple’s Push Notification Service, meaning you can now setup the app to notify you of various types of status alert. Not to add more the in-app interface, (heck – the app is overflowing with functionality!), the guys at Facebook have decided to oust the settings for notifications to iPhone OS Settings. Simply head over to Settings > Facebook. Configurable notification options include the ability to setup push alerts for Messages, Wall posts, Friend requests, Friend confirmations, Photo tags, Events and of course, Comments.

Other changes include the ability to sync your contacts from Contacts.app. Now, navigating to the ‘Friends’ section, you’ll find a ‘Sync’ button in the top right. Hit it! The app will give you options to both turn syncing on and off and will ask you if you’d like to replace photos of your existing contacts with those of their profile pictures on Facebook. To clarify, this new sync feature allows you to add both profile pictures and link data (which already resides on Facebook) to contacts that already exist on your iPhone. In order to do this the app will take contact information from your iPhone, and upload it to Facebook – and of course, before it does you get the usual “please allow us to do this by tapping below. Oh! .. and tell your friends you’re doing it too – so they don’t, you know, get angry!” agreement which you’ll need to accept. It’s pretty quick too, with my own set 74 contacts taking just just a few minutes to sync.

I asked my followers on Twitter to give me a little insight into what they thought of this update. Here’s just a hand pick of what they had to say ..

“Push notifications are perfect. Contact photos are horrible quality, and a waste of time!”
- @Digeratii

“It’s ok. The matching of friend names to contacts was ok, but annoying that it replaced pics for contacts who already had them.” – @StuartRidout

“Contact sync worked, but would prefer some sort of confirmation. No sound for notifs (for me at least).” – @DevinStoker

“I think I’m ready for 3.2.” – @JoshuaArnao

So far, overall reaction to this update seems mixed – and it’s not a surprise. There have been isolated reports of the app syncing the wrong photos to certain contacts, general inconsistencies .. among other quirks, and sadly 3.1 still leaves us waiting for true video support for Facebook uploaded videos. Facebook 3.1 is available on the App Store now, as a free update.

Update: Wow, that was fast! Today, Facebook for iPhone 3.1.1 is available. According to the App Store description the update includes “bug fixes for address book syncing”.

Facebook

Our Rating: :: HIGHLY RECOMMENDED :: Read Our Full Review >>

Category: Social Networking
Released: 2008-07-11
Price: FREE

Gift Idea: eStarling TouchConnect – 802.11n Touchscreen Connected Photo Frame

I’ve been looking at connected photo frames for a while now. Until recently they have been been too closed and lacking in features. I think that the eStarling TouchConnect comes the closest I’ve seen to what I envision as the perfect digital photo frame. And the best thing is, it works, and works well with the iPhone.

This main way you will get photos and videos to this frame is via email. That’s right, email. The ingenious way that eStarling have come up with to get photos on to the frame over the network involves you connecting the frame to a GMail account and sending photos and video to display to that account. An interesting solution to how to get images to the frame. I’ve set up an account photoframetest@gmail.com — feel free to send me your (clean) photos.

Photos and Videos

Not only can you email photos, you can also mail videos right to the device from anywhere from your iPhone. Traveling and want to send the family back home some pictures or a short video (less than 20 MB)? Just email it. Give one of these frames to the grandparents and be able to send photos to them anytime from anywhere with your iPhone. A fantastic feature.

The frame will automatically download the photos and videos in the background and they will be added to the rotation on your frame. You also have the option of pulling up thumbnail screens and navigate between the photos stored in the 2 GB on board memory.

Connected Services

Connected is right in the title of this frame. And it is connected. It allows access to your photos via email as stated above, Flickr, Picasa, RSS Feeds, and even Facebook. Setting up these services is made very easy and done by either entering in your login information or utilizing the same email address you set up to send photos to the frame to activate links.

RSS Feeds

You can grab an RSS feed from one of many places to feed photos into the photo frame. A great and very flexible feature. Just search for “photo RSS” for a huge list of feeds you can use from news sources, photography sites, etc. Here’s a great one from the Boston Globe’s Big Picture feature.

Flickr

The Flickr connection allows you to authenticate with your Flickr account. Even though you need to authenticate there is no way to choose what pictures to show. Only your public pictures will show on the frame. I chose not to authenticate with Flickr as the authentication was requesting delete access. There’s no need for that and I consider it a risk, so I chose to not authenticate. You’d be better off just choosing one of the RSS feeds from Flickr and using those as it will get you the same result without needing to authenticate and giving the frame delete access.

You can get creative with the Flickr RSS feeds as well and use tags to designate which photos should show up on the frame. What I did is create a unique tag for the frame and pull the RSS feed for the photos with that tag. To do this, navigate to the Flickr page for the tag you want to use and grab the RSS feed link from the bottom of the page.

Flickr videos are not supported at this time.

Facebook

Authenticating with Facebook was pretty easy. Clicking on a link and giving the app access. The frame then quickly pulled down all of the photos I had uploaded to Facebook. Would really like the ability to grab photos friends have uploaded too.

Picasa

You have the option of signing into any Google account to authenticate with Picasa. Good if you already have an account set up and don’t want to move things to the Google account you are using for the photo frames email address. From there the photo frame pulls your latest photos. Again, with this service, I’d like some ability to designate which photos to download.

Google Calender?

That’s right, there’s also Google Calendar integration. You can authenticate to any Google Calendar and have your daily calendar shown on the screen. Did we mention this frame was connected?

Twitter Is Everywhere

Yep, now you can read and sent tweets from a photo frame. I’m not sure, can you even use Twitter from a computer anymore?

How About The Screen

The screen on this photo frame is a pretty decent 10.1 inches. The resolution isn’t that fantastic at 800×480, but good enough for most pictures viewed from more than a few inches away. The real issue is that it collects fingerprints like crazy. Keep something close by to clean those off.

On screen navigation allows you to move between photos and turn on / off the different connected features. In addition, there’s an optional sidebar that allows you show the time, date, and local weather. As the screen is 16×9, for 4×6 images, this sidebar fills in the extra space.

SD Card Support

When you insert an SD card into the frame it will switch from showing your connected photos to the photos on the card. Great for quickly showing family recent photos. Unfortunately videos on the SD card are not supported.

Overall, I think the TouchConnect frame is the most connected frame I’ve seen yet. I really appreciate all of the connection options they have provides. And while you can turn them on and off at will, all of the images blend when they are all turned on. Would be nice to be able to navigate the images from each service individually and find a way to limit what is downloaded. If you turn everything on it’s easy to have hundreds of images all at once with no way to segment them.

But, with conservative and proper set up, it can really work well.

Want to know more about this digital frame? Here’s the eStarling product page and the PDF Product Manual.

It’s available right now, on special price, for $199 from the manufacturer’s web site.

Disclosure notice: eStarling provided us a review model of this photo frame for the purposes of completing this review.

“…in essence, if you like to play Farmville and are looking for some more farming action on your iPhone – iFarm is your game. Plus you can’t go wrong, it’s free.”

Boxcar is a nearly-flawless notification app for Facebook, email, and Twitter, and I love. What else is there to say?

Facebook 3.0 Hits App Store

Facebook 3.0 has finally been approved and is in the app store, much to the delight of Joe Hewitt, the Facebook engineer who submitted the update to apple. I won’t go into his issues with the app store, but needless to say, he’s not a fan of the review process. Regardless, after a solid two week wait, Facebook 3.0 is here, and it’s quite nice.

It has quite a few small but worthwhile fixes, but the major thing, at least to me, is the inclusion of video from the iPhone 3GS. It’s a pretty logical inclusion to me, but I’m sure AT&T is peeing themselves due to what I’m sure will be ridiculous bandwidth usage.

If you don’t have it yet, go ahead and download the Facebook app from the app store. It claims that it is version 2.5… but it lies… you’ll get a shiny new copy of 3.0. Apparently you just can’t handle the truth.

For a full rundown of the update features, click on the jump.
Continue reading Facebook 3.0 Hits App Store »

Keeping up with the Jones’ just became a hell of a lot easier with feX for Facebook. Instantly keep your contacts from Facebook in perfect harmony with your iPhone. Huzzah!

An App to Help Make the World a Better Place, DoGood

I think I’ve found my new favorite app.

DoGood from Mobil33t is a simple little app, well designed, and single purpose. DoGood presents you with a single task every day, a task that does a little bit of good for yourself or someone else.

Once you complete the task you can post a comment about what you did or the task itself. You can also read what other people have posted. Also available is an archive of previous task comments. Once you do the daily task you can post it to Twitter or Facebook via Safari Mobile.

See, I told you it was simple.

The app was developed by 3 Univerisity of Michigan students and is the first project of the company they started to develop iPhone apps, Mobil33t.

The app is free, so why not download it and do a little good?

DoGood

Category: Lifestyle
Released: 2009-06-08
Price: FREE

Docked on a nightstand or desk, your iPhone makes for the perfect digital photo frame. DreamStream greatly enhances viewable photo sources by accessing pictures from MobileMe, Facebook albums and Flickr tags among others. Even your friends’ photos aren’t safe!

I thought that the notion of a Mafia app with a cutesy pet theme sounded pretty dull—until I tried it. Epic Pet Wars is a quick, free, mindless MMO that’ll bring out the animal abuser in all of us.

Scrabble’s most recent update—the full-fledged integration of Facebook Connect—adds some competition to what was already a great word game. While the port does have plenty of flaws, it’s still the same amazing game of strategy, luck, and knowledge that’s been an incredible success for decades.

With Flixster you can watch movie trailers, view listings for your favorite theaters or check DVD release dates. Now you can also rate movies and share information with friends through Facebook. And they say there’s no such thing as free popcorn.

With Jetset: A Game For Airports, the author’s intention was to create a game that air travelers could pick up and play while waiting at the airport for their flights. It makes good on its intentions by using location services that allow you to unlock location specific souvenirs, which can then be shared with friends via Facebook. The game definitely has broader appeal than just for travelers though, with fast paced game play that is humorous and interesting.

Facebook for iPhone is the child prodigy of it’s web based social networking parents.

Yahoo! Brings OneConnect Native App to iPhone OS

OneConnect is an attempt by Yahoo! to unify all of the social networks you use into one application. They have released this pretty interesting looking application to the iTunes App Store now. Downloading now…

Features:
* Get a full-featured phone book that can integrate contacts from your Yahoo! Address Book, iPhone, and your social networks (including: Bebo, Dopplr, Facebook, Flickr, Friendster, hi5, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube).
* Connect with your friends via Yahoo! Messenger or SMS. Have fun with emoticons, avatars, and photos.
* See what’s happening on your favorite social networks with an at-a-glance view of status updates, photo uploads, and more.
* Find your favorite people quickly and call, message, or send an e-mail—with one tap.

[ Read More @ Yahoo! ]

Facebook iPhone OS App has 1 Million+ Users

Facebook reported today at the Mobile Web Wars that their Facebook iPhone OS application has 1 million users.  This is totally amazing, if true.  Considering that it has never been the most popular free application in the store there must be other applications with even more users.

Hopefully Apple will release some statistics soon on sales in the App Store. The first couple days of the App Store being open stats could be gathered in the mobile App Store.  That was cut off by Apple, quickly.

via [Techcrunch]