If you haven’t logged on in a while, you’ll be presented with “News Feed”. This view contains a summary of what you may have missed since you last logged-on. It includes some of your friends status, links, photos, and videos. The posts shown depend on varying factors like the number of comments they received, the number of likes, the number of views, etc.

After looking through this summarized version, you may opt to view the “Live News Feeds” which contain the latest updates from your friends. This view integrates the “News Feeds” view and “Highlights” which used to appear on the right-hand side of the Facebook home page. So aside from the usual status updates, links, videos, application updates, and others, it also includes information like friends that one of your own friends added, groups that your friends joined, what your friends became a fan of, etc.

In short, “Live News Feeds” contains more information that you may or may not care about.  Although Facebook still gives you the option to hide application updates and even friends from the view, you cannot hide the “became friends with”, “has become a fan of”, “has joined the group” information. That is really a big downer for me as I don’t want those information on my stream.

Apparently, a lot of people have the same sentiment. They have cried out to Facebook to bring back the old version of the home page.

But this recent change may also be a blessing in disguise. It shows you how much information you yourself may be unwittingly sharing to the world. For me, it made me review my privacy settings on my Facebook account.

From the settings page, I realized that like my friends, I was allowing Facebook to send out the same information that I didn’t want appearing on my home page. Check out your own privacy settings and think about what you want or don’t want published. If you want something published you may want to limit those who can see it. For example, most of my information and updates cannot be seen by people who are not on my friends lists. I’ve also chosen not to publish information about who I’ve added as a friend, what groups I joined, and I just became a fan of.

To get to the privacy settings, go to the Settings menu located at the upper right hand portion of the Facebook page and select Privacy Settings. From that page, you can tweak your privacy options for the following:

1. Profile. This is information about you. This includes your birthday, current location, education information and work information. You may want to limit who sees this information particularly your birthday as this piece of information can be used in identity theft.
2. Search. You will want others — particularly your friends who are not on your friends list yet — to be able to find you but you may still want to limit what information is shown on search pages. You can also opt not to be included in search outside of Facebook (e.g. Google, Yahoo!, Bing).
3. News Feed and Wall. Here is where you control whether or not you want to publish information about the friends you’ve added, groups you joined, etc.
4. Applications. The settings here control what information is available to the applications integrated with Facebook.

You may need to tweak your settings several times until you are satisfied. To do this you may need to ask a friend to help you out so you can verify what information you are not allowing to be published are not being published and only the information you want published are being published. Since Facebook is constantly evolving, you may want to check on your settings once in a while to see if they’ve somehow been reset, if new privacy option settings appear or if old ones disappear.

Facebook and other social networking sites are still for me a great tool to connect with each other. But at the same time we still need to be aware that any information we put up may just be something that we or our friends may or may not want to see.

Then just the other day, I read that Yahoo! Finance for Mobile for iPhone/iPod Touch was available at the App Store. So, I decided to give it a try and compare it with Bloomberg Mobile.

Adding stocks

Bloomberg Mobile "My Stocks" Screen

With Bloomberg Mobile, you just select the ‘My Stocks’ icon on the bottom of the screen and you’ll see a list of your stocks. The information on the two right-most columns can be changed so that you can view the last price traded, % change from previous close, the price you initially bought the stocks, profit and loss amount, current value, and stock position.

The prices shown on the left are in Philippine Peso. Very useful for me as I usually think in terms of PHP.

To rearrange, add or remove items, just select the Edit button. When you access the add new stock screen from the Edit screen, you can search for stocks either by company name or stock symbol. You can then enter the number of stocks that you have (stock position) as well as the price bought.

Yahoo Finance Mobile "Quotes" Screen

The Yahoo! Finance for Mobile for iPhone has a cooler interface when displaying stock information. Just select the Quotes button at the top of the screen and you’ll be presented with your list of stocks as well as currency exchange rates. You can even customize the view for each stock to include more information such as a mini-chart.

However, the downside for me is that stocks prices are displayed in USD. If there was an option to change how this information is displayed, I have not discovered it yet. I like how you could add currency exchange rates. Bloomberg Mobile has a feature that displays currency exchange rates but it is on a different screen and unfortunately, I could not add the Philippine Peso.

When rearranging items, Bloomberg Mobile allows you to simply drag the items so you can change the order of your stocks. With Yahoo! Finance Mobile, you have to hold down the item and when a pop-up menu appears, you can remove, resize or move the item. Selecting move, will enable small dots to appear on the different items. An instruction at the bottom of the screen tells you to touch a dot to move items. How touching the item will move it to another portion of your list, I haven’t figured it out yet.

Viewing Stock Information

Both applications give you the option to view stock charts and other information like stock movements for the day, the last month, the last six months, etc. Bloomberg Mobile conveniently shows you this information in one screen. With Yahoo! Finance Mobile, it spans three screens so you will have to page through the information before you find what you need.

Bloomberg Mobile and Yahoo! Finance Mobile both have delays in getting information from their respective servers. That’s not really a problem for me since I don’t have a wi-fi connection everywhere I go. All I need is keep updated once in a while. However, I do expect to see some information (i.e. the information from the last download)  if ever the application cannot establish a connection to the server. That is, information from the last download is cached on the device.

With Bloomberg, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. I tried not to download data for a couple of days and some of the stock information still displayed. A message on the bottom of the screen even showed when — a date if it’s more than a day or the time if it’s within the day — the data was last downloaded. There are times though, that nothing is displayed at all and an error message at the bottom of the screen tells me that there is no internet connection.

However, with Yahoo! Finance Mobile, it does not show any information at all when you launch the application without an Internet connection. Not even the last stock price or last currency exchange rate is cached.

I’m not sure if it’s a glitch or it was behaving how it was supposed to, but when I launched Yahoo! Finance Mobile for the first time and added stocks that I want to monitor, no chart information was downloaded. Furthermore, it seemed that the stock price is not updated. I had expected that the data will at least provide information from the previous  trading day. But it didn’t.

Conclusion

Although, Yahoo! Finance Mobile offers a great (and cool) interface, it still needs a bit more tweaking in terms of how some of the information is presented and how users can arrange items. However, there is such great promise there. I’m sure an updated version of Yahoo! Finance Mobile is already in the works.

Bloomberg Mobile remains simple to use and gets the needed information to the user. I would love to see some of the UI from Yahoo! Finance Mobile on Bloomberg Mobile, though.

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.

iBank Mobile

For a few months now, I have been on the look out for a financial management app from the App Store. Although most of the apps that I tried came with lite versions, the features that they showcased were not enough to make me go ahead and purchase the full versions. I’ve almost given up my search until I discovered iBank Mobile from IGG Software. Created by the same people who made iBank for the Mac, it offers a great interface to enter transactions while you are on the go.

The application was designed to run either as a standalone mobile application or as a companion application to the desktop version. If you run it as a companion application, you have the advantage of synching transactions between your Mac and your iPhone/iPod Touch.

Unlike other personal finance apps that are sold on the App Store, iBank Mobile does not have a lite or trial version. Thus, I had to buy it for USD4.99 just to try it. I have to admit that the app coming from IGG Software was an advantage. About a year ago, my wife and I tried out iBank and was very impressed by the software.

When I first launched iBank Mobile, I was asked if I wanted to use it standalone or if I wanted to do a sync. I selected standalone. From that point, it was a matter of setting up my accounts: cash accounts, savings, checking, credit cards, etc. even line of credit accounts. I was expecting to be prompted for the beginning balance for each account but that didn’t happen. So, I created a transaction for each account wherein the Payee was “Beginning Balance” and entered the initial balances. It would’ve been great if this were part of the account setup process particularly if the app will be used as a standalone application. If the app will sync with the desktop version, then the beginning balances can be picked up easily.

The next thing I tried was to do a transfer between accounts. I had to search the support website before I could figure out how to do it. In my first attempt, I placed the transfer transaction’s target account in the Payee field. I found it strange that the name of the account was not in the list, so I typed it in. When I saved the transaction, I could not understand why the amount was debited from the source account but not credited to the target account. It would’ve been really strange if I had to enter two separate transactions.

Luckily, I found the answer in the support website. Apparently, someone else was having the same problem. I discovered that to do a transfer between accounts, you select the target account via the Category field. But then, the list of accounts is listed on top of the Categories that you have created. You will have to scroll before you can actually see the accounts. That is not very intuitive in my opinion. I mean why use the categories field in the first place? Hopefully, the guys at IGG Software will realize this and come up with something better in a future release.

A neat feature of iBank Mobile that I really like is the passcode option allows you to set a passcode that is longer than four numbers. So far, I have tried using passcodes that have six, seven, and eight digits. It appears though that you can even enter more than ten digits but I guess this is only good if you have a good memory. The passcode is requested each time you open the app — even if your device sleeps and then wakes up while you are within the app.

Overall, iBank Mobile is a great app well worth the USD4.99. It is also worth noting that this is a very early version of the software and it already has great features. The developers themselves admitted that they only focused on core functions when they released it. We can only expect even better versions of this app.

Word Camp Philippines 2009

WordPress WordCamp is coming to the Philippines on September 19, 2009. The event is a great way to meet other WordPress enthusiasts. If you are a WordPress user or you if you want to know more about WordPress, consider attending WordCamp Philippines 2009. You can learn more about the event as well as register by going to the WordCamp Philippines website at http://wordcamp.ph.

I had decided as early as 2003 that I have had enough of Windows. I started with DOS in 1987 (I was in second year high school at the time) and eventually moved up to Windows 95 in 1996, Windows 98 in 1999, and XP in 2003.

After dealing with viruses and spyware, unexplained slowdowns and crashes, and numerous security updates appearing almost daily, I finally went on a limb and installed Linux on a separate partition of my XP machine and configured the machine for dual-boot with Linux as the primary OS. After a few months, I was using Linux more and more, and Windows less and less. Until one day, the Windows partition refused to boot except on Safe mode. That was the last straw. No more Windows for me. I had re-installed Windows XP and Windows XP Service Pack 2 three times in a span of a few months and I wasn’t going to do it anymore. But because I’m lazy, I still didn’t remove the Windows XP partition. This laziness is due to the fact that I didn’t want to backup everything, install Linux, and restore the data.

But after using Linux for a few years, I realized something was still missing. Don’t get me wrong. Linux is a great OS. It’s fast, secure, no viruses, etc. There was no problems with updates since I was using Fedore Core. I think Fedora releases the most frequent updates compared to other distributions. From what I recall, there’s a new version every six months or so.

Now all this time, there was something inside me — a small voice — that’s telling me, “Why don’t you look at Macs?”. But I’d contradict myself and say that a Mac isn’t for me, it’s too expensive, it’s only for graphic design, desktop publishing, music composition, movie special effects, and other lies. The voice became stronger during the time my wife and I were making our wedding preps. Our photographer/videographer was using a couple Macs with two cinema displays to edit and produce the video, edit and enhance the photos, and layout the album. Wow! What a great setup! How I’d love to have that at home. My wife was very impressed too.

Since seeing those Macs and the cinema displays, we’ve always talked about getting a Mac. Then early this year, as if we attended a free Mac seminar at the Glorietta. During the seminar we saw what Mac OS X Tiger could do. We were also very impressed with iLife, Dashboard, Spotlight, and other features and applications. That was it! We were speechless! We wanted a Mac!

I still had to do some research of course. How much does it cost? How do I go about service? Is it cheaper to have it imported? Which stores sells Macs at the lowest price? I had a lot of questions. Fortunately, all my googling pointed me to the Philippine Macintosh Users Group (PhilMUG). During the research phase, I merely signed up and read posts. I admit I was “afraid” since I wasn’t a Mac user yet and felt that I wasn’t “in” with the group. Besides, I was getting answers to my questions just by reading the posts.

Then in February, after some research, we purchased our Mac. When we got it home, we unpacked it, only to realize that the store forgot to mention that we had to buy a plug adapter. Jeez! The Mac was right there, and we couldn’t even turn it on. We had to wait another day! We really had to calm ourselves. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have been able to sleep with all the excitement. The next day, we got the plug adapter. But guess what? I made a mistake when I took measurements of the computer table and now the 17″ Mac won’t fit! We nearly cried in frustration. Since it was very late at night, we had to wait again until the next day so we could make the adjustments. We just told ourselves that when we finally turn on the Mac, it’ll just be sweeter.

On the third day after purchase, finally or should I say mercifully, we fixed the table, put our new Mac on it, attached the plug adapter, plugged it in, turned it on, and voila! What a sweet and wonderful sound! We can still remember the first time the Mac booted up. It was definitely the answer to the Windows and Linux woes. The Mac was perfect. We were able to use it immediately without installing anything. Even installing updates or new applications was easier than it was with Windows. The graphics and interface was so much better AND cooler too. Heck! Even the apps are cooler!

We have enjoyed it ever since and for the past few months, we haven’t even turned it off. My wife and I even sort of compete for time on the Mac. If one of us leaves the Mac to do something else, the other one is sure to immediately grab the opportunity to use it.

All in all we can say that we are now full blooded Mac users. Though our Intel Mac allows us to install Windows via Bootcamp or Parallels, we don’t plan to do it anytime soon. I mean, what for? We’ve already spent a lot of sleepless nights whether it’s just surfing, watching movies, listening to music on iTunes, or creating albums in iPhoto. We’ve even tried making a simple movie from the movies in our digicam and creating a DVD that can be played on a DVD player. There so much more you can do and you have fun doing it. I can’t say the same thing with Windows or Linux.

My wife and I are planning on getting a Mac for our next computer. It’s really a different breed of computer from what we’ve heard, read, and seen. It doesn’t get sick (no viruses) or attacked (no security holes) that easily.

But when I learned about computers, the terms CPU, RAM, ROM, and FDD were introduced to me. Of course there was also BASIC, COBOL, as well as EBCDIC, ASCII, and BCD.

As I entered college for my BS in Computer Science a lot more acronyms came along as computers now came with hard disk drives (HDDs) and CD-ROMs. Concepts on Operating Systems (OS), RDBMS, PROM, EPROM, OSI, TCP/IP, FTP, WWW, and VR gave my brain even more strain. With optical media nowadays there’s CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R, DVD-RW, and DVD-RW+.

Now that I’m an IT professional for nearly 10 years, the list just gets longer with SQL, HTML, DHTML, XML, PHP, ASP, to name a few. And if you’re not careful you and your colleague may be both talking about ASP but are referring to two totally different things: Application Service Providers or Active Server Pages. When I was a kid soap was just soap and Ajax was a brand of detergent. Now SOAP and AJAX are technologies used on the Internet.

With the abundance OSS (Open Source Software) there is an equivalent number of OSS Licenses. Take GPL, MPL, and LGPL. Of course there are the organizations that push OSS: FSF, OSI, and many others.

But it doesn’t really end there does it? With email, IM, and SMS (text messaging) now common means of communication, more and more acronyms get added to the list everyday. Can you keep up with CUL8R, BTW, IMHO, ROTFL, BCNU, or BRB?

Even love notes are embedded with acronyms. I won’t list them here lest I may accidentally divulge the cryptic codes I share with my wife.

I was already trying out different flavors of Linux even before. The only hindrance was those Linux versions apperently did not support my hardware. My first attempt was using Slackware. It won’t even boot up from the CD, so I junked that attempt. I then tried Mandrake 8.0 but eventually settled for Fedora when I got a new PC. Around that time, OpenOffice.org was becoming popular. With OO’s support for MS Office formats, which is the most important thing, I never looked back. To top it off I discovered GIMP, which is a lot like Photoshop, except that it was free.

Today, I’m using Linux at home most of the time. The only time I boot to Windows is when I need to visit websites that are use Microsoft controls. At the top of the list of such sites is one of the banks I do business with. Printing in color is another reason for me to boot to Windows as HP’s Linux support is still quite limited. But get this, I still use OpenOffice and GIMP even when I’m in Windows, so I can still say that all my software is legal.

On both platforms, the application software installed are a mix of freeware, free for personal use, and open-source.

The bottom line is you can stay legal. There are a lot of free and open-source software out there that you can use. Most of them are at par with their commercial counterparts.

But if they are looking for a challenge, I always say that they should look to Java. It’s difficult to ignore that Java is everywhere today. The Web, desktops, and even mobile devices. Not learning it is a disadvantage. I know that Microsoft .NET people will react to this but the thing is, Java is a cross-platform language. It works on Linux, Windows, iSeries, Solaris, etc. You just can’t say the same for .NET.

Of course, learning and getting to use it in a project are two different things. For my part I know a little of Java but haven’t had the chance to use it in a full-blown project just yet. I have talked to my bosses about this and hopefully we can work something out in the coming months.

Focusing on the midrange platform is great. No doubt about that. Developers belonging to the midrange community are the most sought after IT professionals in the world today. But adding Java to one’s arsenal can only mean greater things. Don’t you think?