Facebook hates the iPad

By Josh Highland in iPad, Josh's Rambling

I just got off the phone with my mom. She said that Facebook wasn’t working on her iPad. Specifically, she couldn’t pinch the screen to zoom in and out. I verified the problem on my wifes iPad.

I started to dig a bit deeper into the issue. It appears that Facebook had intentionally added code onto their site to disable the zoom feature on iPads. You can read Apples documentation on how to do this here.

The question really isn’t how they did it, but why would Facebook would do this? This doesn’t seem like an accident.

Reasons why Facebook has disabled screen zooming on the iPad:

  • Today, 10/20/10, was a major announcement day for Apple. It’s possible that Facebook wanted to humiliate Apple or make the iPad look weak.
  • Android and Backberry tablets are set to be released soon. It’s possible that Facebook could have been paid off by one of Apples competitors to make the iPad not work so great with their site.
  • Facebook has realized that hardly anyone with an iPad uses the iOS Facebook app. Maybe the are trying to force users to use the app. Personally I think the Facebook app is garbage, it’s not even designed for the iPad!
  • It could have been an honest mistake. However, I don’t think this is the case. If this was a mistake, Facebook could have fixed it in a matter of minutes.

I’d love to hear some of your reasons on why Facebook is doing this to iPad users around the world.

Yes, you can “touch” this

By Josh Highland in linux, mac, tutorials

“touch” is a handy unix utility to udate the time stamp on a file. Recenly I ran into a case on my mac book pro that required me to update all of the files and sub-directories of a project with the current date.

In terminal, I could have gone one by one an used this command on each file

touch thisIsAFileName

But after a few moments of onterweb searching, I came across a perfect solution

find . -print0 | xargs -0 touch

This command will find all of the file in all sub-directories, even if they have spaces in their name, and set their last updated time to the current time.

Just a handy tip I thought I would share

iPhone text tones are now possible!

By Josh Highland in iPhone

YES, iOS 4.2 NOW HAS THE ABILITY TO SET INDIVIDUAL TEXT MESSAGE TONES FOR YOUR CONTACTS!

Sorry for the caps, but its worth screaming. Ever since custom ring tones were possible on the iPhone I have wondered why there was never SMS tones. Hell, a phone that I had 6 years ago had that ability.

One thing that does suck is the fact that you can use a custom tones. You can only use the tones that are available on the iPhone. I hope in the future that the iTunes store will carry tones that we can download and use.