Monday, June 21, 2010

Updated Facebook app, broken?

It would appear there's some apparent problem with the app(s) for Facebook judging by this title. However, when I dived into the article I was continously surprised and dissapointed with what I found. So this article will unfortunately not be very positive. (Apple lovers, you've been warned.)

There was a time when Facebook was at the forefront of mobile app development. Before there was even an App Store, the web app Facebook put out that was optimized for the iPhone was brilliant. Then the App Store came and with it was a great Facebook native app. Then came version 3 of the app, which was even better. Those days, sadly, are long over.
 Huh, starts off good enough. Seems like it's on track. But then it jumps straight to this.

Everyone already knows that the Facebook Android app sucks.
 Really? I'm apparently living under a technological rock because I wasn't aware of this at all. But should I really expect anything less from an article evidently written by, what I'm going to take a wild guess, [Insert eye roll here]  Apple fanboy? Well...er...no, no I should not. I say this because the obviously biased remarks cross the border straight into what I found to be hilarity.

First of all, Facebook still has yet to release a native iPad app. This is pretty ridiculous considering that undoubtedly a high percentage of the millions of iPad owners have searched the App Store for a Facebook app, and come away with only imitations (which Facebook has demanded be taken down).

Exaggeration ignored, I find it amusing that people still think Facebook is their friend. Now, from a distant point of view I'd have to say Facebook doesn't feel like it need "us" (Because obviously I never trusted Facebook enough to use it, but the picture is clear.) anymore and therefore is not working as hard as it used to when it knew it's future depended on us. See the problem with this is that Facebook has definitely experienced a drop in users over it's attitude towards these same users. Obviously, Facebook's future still depends on it's users. But who would give up playing Farmville just because the website it's on happens to violate their privacy and give them the finger in the form of restricting mobile access to their site? Your faith in humanity might be saying, "haha nice sarcasm", but my faith in humanity took a long walk when I heard about Farmville addiction. Farmville just happens to be a ridiculously popular facebook game that is true to it's name.

Oh, and that wasn't the hilarity yet.

 Third, this update has at least one glaring UI bug. Sure, bugs are a part of the game, but how Facebook overlooked this one is dumbfounding. If you have new messages or friend requests on Facebook, load up the main screen in the app. There you’ll find certain areas badged to let you know there are updates for you to see — but these badges have a dark upper area that clashes badly with the light background of the main screen. I mean, it just looks awful. How did that get through quality control?

...Yeah, this is what all the hype is about here. This is what makes the app broken. A slight graphical glitch that does nothing but "clash". Here's a screen shot to demonstrate how insanely stupid this is.

You see those black edges on the upper half of the small red and white buttons "1" and "15"? The ones to the upper right of Inbox and Requests respectively? That's what is being complained about.

There's no loss of function. It just doesn't look nice to some. I don't even know what to say to that. It's just so... trivial.

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