Informal Brain

Finally!  Version 2.0 of Facebook for the iPhone launched today.  Ever since I saw the totally amazing photo tagging demo on YouTube about a month ago I have been following the release date of this new version closely.  Today the wait is over.

Highlights:

1. Photo Tagging — Click, tag and go.  It is fast, and amazingly easy to tag a photo and get it posted.  This is simply the best photo sharing experience for the iPhone now.

2. Inline Commenting — This is a game changer for the level of interactivity within the Facebook newsfeed.  Now you can click on the small link beside pretty much any wall post, newsfeed item or photo and leave a quick inline comment.  Works very well.  Look out Friendfeed!

3. Chat — Works better then ever.  Looks just like iChat.  Nice job.

4. User Interface — Lots of subtle effects like fly-ins when posting make the UI really fun to use.

Improvements!

1. Quick scroll to the top of the page.  Steal this from Twitterific and Mobile Safari guys.  When you are way down a page it takes a bunch of finger swipes to get back to the top.

2. View Friends of Friends.  This is a nice feature which helps you pick the right person out of the crowd when searching.

Otherwise, again this is a GREAT upgrade.  Good job Facebook team.

Start your appstore checks! Facebook 2.0 is released! Review coming shortly.

This morning the screenshot for the Facebook iPhone application changed to a version 2.0 shot. The application is still 1.1 however. Keep refreshing. We should see the new version soon.

Tonchidot: Visual Tagging for the iPhone | The iPhone Blog.

Like something from the future, you have to see this video. If Tonchidot can bring this to market it will revolutionize the way we use our mobile computers to interact with our surroundings. Truly astounding.

Start counting down the days and refreshing your App Store icons starting tomorrow. The long awaited refresh of the Facebook iPhone app is upon us.

Thanks everyone for being patient waiting for me to finish Facebook for iPhone 2.0. The good news is, I plan to submit the update to the iPhone App Store a week from today. That doesn’t necessarily mean you will be able to download it a week from today - Apple reviews every application before making it available, and they can sometimes take up to a week. So, you may get the update as soon as next Wednesday, or as late as October 1st.

[From Facebook | Facebook for iPhone's Notes]

The new photo tagging looks absolutely wild. It looks like it leverages touch services so you can tap the photo after you have taken it on the device and tag it with your contacts on the phone using touch gestures. Brilliant!

Just when you thought you got rid of that incriminating email on your iphone, or removed that suspect web site from your cache you might be surprised to hear that the iPhone captures an image of the application when the “home” button is pressed.

As widely reported, the iPhone takes a screenshot every time the home button is pressed so that the 3D “zoom” effect can be processed when the application zooms in and out, when suspending and resuming applications. These shots are stored, at least temporarily, on the device, presenting potential privacy issues.

[From Keeping Your iPhone From Spying on You - iPhone Atlas]

A forensic analyst can retrieve the images from the phone by mounting the disk and using data recovery tools to reconstruct the images as they are not actually removed from the disk, just the pointers to the files are removed. This continues to demonstrate that the iPhone cannot be treated as a secure device. The iPhone atlas site demonstrates a way to disable the image storage on a jail broken phone. For the average user, be aware that your iPhone is keeping a log of your activity.

I continue to make the argument for encryption. To make that a reality, with good performance, Apple may need to embed a dedicated encryption processor to the device.

Today Nancy Pelosi made a bold statement about the 700 billion dollars requested by the current administration to rescue the financial markets:

Democrats believe a responsible solution should include independent oversight, protections for homeowners and constraints on excessive executive compensation.

[From The Page - by Mark Halperin - TIME]

Unfortunately, I couldn’t agree less. Now is not the time to fix what is broken. What must be done immediately is put some liquid capital into the markets. Once that is done, I believe some additional regulation is needed, but protection for homeowners doesn’t make any sense. These people knew they were getting into a mortgage they couldn’t afford immediately or at some point in the future.

So the biggest question in my mind now is:

When will we see SquirrelFish Extreme for the Mobile Safari browser on the iPhone?

Apple is already winning the mobile browser wars, and the latest WebKit advancements will only solidify that lead.

It has thus far been an amazing summer when it comes to browser performance.

We have seen 3 major advances in browser performance when it comes to Javascript specifically.

1. Firefox Tracemonkey

2. Google Chrome V8

3. Webkit SquirrelFish Extreme

Each one has been an exciting advancement in browser performance, leaping ahead quickly. I have been a long time Safari / Webkit nightly user on the Mac. I must admit that the release of tracemonkey moved me over to Firefox 3.1 for a few weeks. I longed for Google Chrome and V8 on my Macbook. But, I am happily back to Safari 4 / Webkit now that SquirrelFish Extreme has landed in the webkit nightly builds. It is blazingly fast, and Safari 4 is an excellent browser.

I am looking forward to further competition and code sharing in the open source space. Notice I didn’t say a thing about Internet Explorer 8. It is still lagging.

Informal learning is perception mediated by social interaction and converting into behavior, which in turn converts back into perception.

– Peter Isackson

Intercultural Musings: The definition of informal learning.

“We should all strive to learn informally, by Peter’s definition, to better understand behavior”.