There’s been talk of a Facebook iPad app since the iPad first launched, but back in 2010 Mark Zuckerberg declared that the iPad was “not mobile,” and wouldn’t comment further. Chatter around the app’s eventual release has grown over the months, and today TechCrunch broke the news that the latest iPhone app update is actually a universal binary that contains the iPad-optimized layout as well. We took the plunge and jailbroke our iPad 2 to give it a go ourselves, and after some fairly painless SSH’ing and property list editing we were up and running. Follow along for a quick tour of Facebook’s upcoming iPad app — or something very close to it.
We should start off by mentioning that to unlock this functionality yourself, your iPad has to be jailbroken, so if you’ve already updated to 4.3.4 the wait will continue. We followed these directions over at iClarified, and the whole process was very straightforward. (Update: Some commenters have pointed out that you can avoid jailbreaking and still edit the .plist file in question — we did jailbreak though). TechCrunch has also just issued another report indicating that Facebook has wised up to the trick and is trying to block it for folks who aren’t already logged in. For what it’s worth, the app still works for us but some of the features are no longer functional (namely Facebook chat).
User Interface
Wrap-up
Facebook’s iPad offering certainly looks to be a welcomed addition to a world previously cluttered with third party solutions that lacked the official iPhone app’s finesse. Standard navigation schemes and user interface ideologies permeate the various functions, resulting in an application that seems easy enough to pick up and use. We have no doubt that whenever it does get official, it’ll become yet another time waster in our arsenal of iPad apps — you can only play Angry Birds so many times.
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