Facebook app for iPhone gets a memory

July 8, 8:21 AMiPhone ExaminerKristina Allen

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Facebook app for iPhone gets an uplift

Joe Hewitt, lead Facebook iPhone app engineer, tweeted early this morning that he is "putting the finishing touches on the Facebook iPhone app." An hour later he tweeted again that the finishing touch he is working on "is making sure the app never loses what you've typed/photographed if you get a phone call or quit." This comes as a highly welcomed enhancement to the app as you can't control it  when a new call starts coming in. Sure you can ignore the call and go back to your previous screen, but currently any unsubmitted information will be gone.

Hewitt says "it will be at least a week" before the app update is ready to be submitted to Apple and then it could be "weeks more for Apple to approve" the app. Going by this somewhat weak timeline, we should see the updates to the Facebook app in early August, perhaps sooner.

Hewitt wrote a blog entry on June 20th, one day after he purchased his iPhone 3GS saying, "two years of anxiety melted away as the realization set in: I get to code for a real computer now, not a cell phone." He elaborates on this saying that previously the iPhone had issues performing "the most basic tasks without constantly stuttering and freezing. As an iPhone developer who cares deeply about user experience, this caused me a lot of grief." 

After taking a few hours to play with the new iPhone 3GS, Hewitt put his Facebook app to the test; having built the app himself, Hewitt knows every bump. After a few minutes of playing with his app on the iPhone 3GS, Hewitt was pleasantly surprised that all of his "pain points" such as the fluidness of scroll and freezing of the app from loading images, seemed to be healed. Hewitt says the experience of using the Facebook app on the iPhone 3GS is "fast, smooth, and perfect every time. I have yet to see the app freeze once."

Hewitt says he understands that it may be a while before all iPhone users are upgraded to the 3GS speedy processors,but he is encouraged by where he can take the Facebook app in the future.

Fore more information on what other new features the app with have, see my New Facebook App for iPhone 3.0 article.