Tech.blog

Facebook for iPhone Home Screen

The latest version of Facebook’s application for the iPhone and iPod Touch is finally available from the App Store. It has a new user interface that totally blows away the UI of the previous version.

Taking a cue from the iPhone OS interface, Facebook for iPhone opens up with a home page containing icons representing common Facebook pages: News Feed, Profile, Friends, Inbox, Chat, Requests, Events, Photos and Notes. You can even add your own links to your friends and pages just as you would add applications on your iPhone when you purchase them from the App Store. You can also rearrange the icons and see different pages of the Facebook home screen the same way you do with the iPhone.

What is nice is that the icons show badges that represent new items. For example, if you have 5 new friend requests, that number is shown with the Requests icon.

In terms of functionality, the Facebook iPhone app is very close to the Facebook website. Below are some of the Facebook for iPhone functions:

The bottom part of the screen shows the latest notification that you may have. Touching that part of the screen will display all of your recent notifications. The number of new notifications also appear as a badge on the iPhone application when you are on the iPhone’s home screen.

When you are in News Feeds, you can filter what is displayed using the group lists that you created in Facebook. It would have been great if the same feature was available in the Friends page. As it is, you can only scroll through a list of all your your friends. So right now, if you created a list to contain your friends from high school and another list to contain your friends from college, you cannot filter your view like you can in Facebooks’ website. But I’m sure this will be addressed in a future release, though.

You can easily comment or like your friends’ posts. It’s all a matter of selecting the post you want to comment on or like, and then selecting the appropriate button.

The Events page conveniently separates events and birthdays just like in Facebook’s website. From the birthdays tab, you can just select a friend who happens to be celebrating a birthday and post to his or her wall.

You can confirm friend requests from the Requests page. I wish you could also confirm fan, group or page requests, but maybe these will come in a future version.

An additional feature that I wish the developers will add is the ability to add a friend to an existing list group whether you are adding a new friend or you are confirming a friend request. Right now, you’ll have to remember to login to your account using a browser so you can add your new friends to the respective lists. Sometimes, I do forget and when I do remember, I have to check all my friends again just to see if I missed adding anyone to their respective list. So you can see how the feature can be handy in the iPhone app; well, at least for me.

The Photos, Notes, Inbox, and Chat apps all function as they should. Although like the Requests and Friends apps, I do wish I could set my online status selectively using the group lists I’ve already created.

Overall, the Facebook for iPhone app is worth the download (and it’s free). It’s the best way to connect to your Facebook buddies whenever you are on the go. If you’re like me, you can even use it while you are on a computer but don’t want to fire up a browser because you are doing something else…like working or playing World of Warcraft, for example.