It’s apparently 98% of the way finished. Here’s Hewitt’s own words:

Facebook for iPhone 3.0 is coming very soon. I can’t predict an exact date when I will submit to Apple, but I can say that I am about 98% done. So

what’s new in this update?

1. The “new” News Feed
2. Like
3. Events (including the ability to RSVP)
4. Notes
5. Pages
6. Create new photo albums
7. Upload photos to any album
8. Zoom into photos
9. Easier photo tagging
10. Profile Pictures albums
11. A new home screen for easy access to all your stuff, search, and notifications
12. Add your favorite profiles and pages to the home screen
13. Better Notifications (they link to the comments so you can reply)
14. Quickly call or text people right from the Friends page
15. Messages you are typing will be restored if you quit or are interrupted by a phone call

The one feature everyone is asking for, Push Notifications, is in development but it won’t make it into 3.0. You can expect it in a 3.1 update later this summer.
When I have submitted the app to Apple I will let you all know!

- Joe

Sounds good, yes?

One has to wonder why they’ve jumped straight from 3.0.0 to 3.1.0. Let’s see, shall we?

Price: £FREE
Description: Tweet on the go with all your favourite TweetDeck features on your iPhone. TweetDeck is your mobile browser for staying in touch with what’s happening now on Twitter from your iPhone or iPod Touch. TweetDeck shows you everything you want to see at once, so you can stay organised and up to date no matter where you are. Create groups, search Twitter, manage multiple accounts and easily post your tweets or share photos, link and much more. Plus sync your existing TweetDeck columns between your desktop and iPhone. Nice and easy.
Rating:

The time has arrived! TweetDeck for the iPhone is upon us!

I’ve been a big TweetDeck Desktop fan for many a month now, and I’m really happy to wake up to see TweetDeck for the iPhone sitting on the AppStore just begging for me to download it. The best part is it’s price. Free!

First Impressions:

Upon opening the app, you’re presented with a page to be able to add your Twitter account. It’s an incredibly sleek setup sequence with prompts for you to sign in to your TweetDeck account so you can sync your columns and what-not from the Desktop version straight onto your iPhone. the setup lasted about 30 seconds, and I was then straight into the application itself.

The first thing I saw was a somewhat familiar colour-scheme and notification. I was really impressed to see that they’d ported over the notifications feature to the iPhone version, because simply put, TweetDeck isn’t TweetDeck without them! As you can see from the screenshot below, there is a set of settings in a sleek black bar.

The bar shows updates to your Twitter account, Refresh feature, Add Column, Settings and More. We’ll look through each of these in detail, shall we?

Updates Button:

I was very impressed with this little feature. Not only does the Updates section of the bottom bar actually show how many updates you’ve missed, or are yet to read, but upon tapping it you’re presented with a box showing exactly how many per column you’re yet to have a gander at, and also a handy little feature to mark them all as seen!

Refresh:

Does exactly what it says on the tin.

Add Column:

This is one of the biggest features in the whole application. This allows you to add an array of different columns such as ‘User Group’, ‘Twitter Search’, ‘All Friends’, ‘Mentions’, ‘Direct Messages’ and ‘Favourites’. This works in exactly the same way as on TweetDeck desktop. I currently have six columns set up on my installation of TweetDeck for the iPhone, and have had it crash just once due to receiving a large amount of updates all in one, whilst trying to scroll down. I’d recommend not doing that!

You also get the option to import columns from the TweetDeck server so that things are set up in the same way as they are on TweetDeck desktop. Clever eh?

Settings:

This opens a completely new screen for you to Manage your multiple accounts, Edit your TweetDeck account and change General settings.

Manage Accounts and TweetDeck account is very self-explanatory. Not much to talk about there, but when it comes to the general settings, there are a few that you can tweak around a little, such as Auto-Correct, Auto-Capitalisation, Picture Service (twitpic or yfrog), Sound Enabled/Disabled, Growl Enabled/Disabled (notification popup), Show Real Names and Shake to Refresh. As you can tell, there are a nice amount of settings to tweak TweetDeck to your liking.

If that isn’t enough Tweaking, hold down on one of your ‘decks’ until they start to wiggle (like you would on your iPhone/iPod home-screen). From this you can re-arrange the way the decks are presented to you. Now that’s cool, right?

‘More’:

From this sub-menu you get two new options to choose from. One being ‘Quick Follow’ and ‘Sync Columns’. Quick Follow is basically a text box popup where you can input a users username and follow them instantly by tapping the “Follow” button. Saves having to find the user through the Search feature and following them form there.

Sync Columns basically does exactly what it says. It syncs your columns with the ones you’ve syncronised to TweetDecks servers.

Main Section:

The ‘main section’ of the application is where all of the tweets are displayed. you can either choose form the zoomed-out view where you can flick through each deck, viewing a maximum of 5 tweets per deck, or tap one of the decks to view the whole thing, allowing you to scroll through them all. You can still flick left and right to navigate through each deck whilst on the full screen mode.

Tapping a tweet will take you to a screen dedicated to that tweet, giving you the option to @reply, send a DM, retweet, email tweet and +favourite.

Tapping the user takes you to their profile. From here, you get the option to Follow the user, View their followers, View who they’re following, @message them, DM then, see their recent Tweets and Block/Unblock the user. You can also see their picture, Name, Twitter UserName and their biography on this screen also.

Notifications:

These are somewhat very similar (actually a lot better looking) to TweetDeck Desktop. They pop up whenever you get a new Tweet, Mention, DM, Search etc. This obviously only occurs in the TweetDeck application itself, due to the iPhone’s restrictions on background processes, but they are a nice little addition to the app itself, for that added sleekness/feature-rich application they were probably looking for.

API Call Information:

This is different for an iPhone Twitter application to have – an ‘API Call Remaining’ feature.

Let’s Tweet:

Tweeting in TweetDeck for the iPhone is easy. All you need to do it tap the new tweet icon in the top right () and you’re presented with a text box, the keyboard and the option to shorten a url, post an image and post your current GPS location to your Twitter profile or to Google Maps. It also appears that URL’s are shortened through bit.ly.

Verdict:

TweetDeck for iPhone seems to be a very decent iPhone Twitter client, although could do with some touch-ups here and there, and the possibility of some new settings. I’d really like to see functionality to just have the zoomed out tweet view (below) as opposed to the full screened one. I like the look and feel of scrolling through each deck that way much better, and think it makes the UI look a lot tidier also.

In terms of keeping up with its sister on the desktop, they have done incredibly well. What sets this app apart from all of the others is a) free b) exclusive ‘deck’ UI c) pop-up notifications (in-app).

It’s a very competitive app and will give all of the other iPhone Twitter applications a run for their money. I, myself have tried the majority, if not all, of the iPhone Twitter apps and this is by far my favourite and has found its pride of place on page one on my iPhone home screen!

A few snags though – it tends to crash on occasion when a large amount of notifications come in, and scrolling is rather rugged compared to other apps such as Tweetie and TwitterFon. By this, I mean it doesn’t scroll smoothly and jitters just a tad.

Other than that, I’ve found no problems as of yet!

Definitely recommended to anybody with an iPhone and likes to Tweet.

Sag - Be Gone!

It brings me great joy to report to you here today that the ever so…ever so disturbing Swiftcover adverts featuring Iggy Pop have come to an end.

It appears that the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) have bought this atrocity to a complete halt due to the fact that a) Iggy Pop was implying that he had insurance cover from Swiftcover, and infact, didn’t and b) People were misled to believe that they offered policies to musicians, which infact, they also did not.

Those of you who’s retinas had burnt out of their eyeballs after the viewings of these adverts, please note that Swiftcover will not cover you for this, and I suggest a more reputable company, Direct Line. Wait….do they even do health insurance?

I have a spare Half-Life 2 and Half-Life 2: Episode One in my Steam account at the minute.

If anyone wants it, just reply here. It’s first come, first served so hurry!

So here I am, sitting watching BBC One, and this programme called ‘Tonights the Night’ comes on. After watching 10 minutes of it, I almost instantaneously become incredibly frustrated, bored and embarrassed that such a programme be allowed to air on the largest television provider in the world’s ‘home channel’.

I can’t help but somewhat relate this feeling to Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway. Is it me or is it the overall aurora that Saturday Night Television gives off? Tacky-ness…

I don’t know why I wrote this blog post. Perhaps a desperation to get away from the tele just for 5 minutes. Ah well, LOST tomorrow, 24 on Monday, Tuesday…meh, and Wednesday – The Apprentice. Can’t be bad thereon.

Well here’s the very few pictures that I’d taken. I was sat on the reserved seats right infront of Serj – was quite amazed. We were waiting in the lobby to be told where our seats are and then Serj walked in, said hi to me asked how I was etc and then moved down to the lecture theatre.

We watched Screamers, Serj and Theo did a Q&A afterwards, people asked them a few questions and they both answered very politely and gracefully. Once the Q&A was over at 8:30pm everyone went outside for the drinks party, but I stayed in to have a chat with Serj before-hand. I mentioned to him who I was and what I do and he was incredibly grateful of the work I’ve put into his projects over the years and said it was an “Honour” to meet me and told me to “keep up the amazing work”. At this point I thought it was obviously a dream! Anyway, I told Serj that I didn’t take many pictures and he put me in contact with the photographer who was there, we exchanged email addresses and hopefully will be getting some nice pro pictures up soon. The Q&A was also recorded but I’m not sure what they’re going to do with that just yet. After, we went outside and had some food and drink and by this time Serj had a crowd of about 8-9 people standing listening to what he had to say about the night.

It was overall an incredible night…surreal…
At about 9:40pm we thought we’d better make a move and get home (2 hour drive ahead of us). Serj also got ready to leave at this point too. I think I heard someone say he was taking the staff out for a meal or something…

Anyway, here are the pictures I managed to get. Not many and not great ones, but hey.

You can find out more information on “Screamers” here: http://lewisbeechey.eu/screamers

Voice Clip from Q&A