After months of speculation, Facebook released today the first version of its official iPad application, available for free on the App Store. The version available today looks fairly similar to the leaked app posted by TechCrunch earlier this year: there is a navigation sidebar on the left side of the screen to search, open your Facebook profile, check out the News Feed, Messages, Events, Friends and more. An upper toolbar gives you access to friend requests, messages and notifications, whilst Chat has been integrated in a right hand vertical panel. Judging from a first test, it appears what we wrote back in July still holds true for the final Facebook iPad app:

Facebook for iPad uses a concept not too dissimilar from Twitter’s iPad app — rather than displaying all content vertically, the app heavily relies on horizontal navigation to access various Facebook sections, the news feed, chats, liked posts, and so forth. For instance, a sidebar on the left contains tabs below your main profile to open your News Feed, Messages, Events, Places, Friends, and Photos. In the same sidebar, there are links to jump to the groups you’re subscribed to — it almost appears as Facebook wants to put the focus on Groups as much as Google gave Circles, its friend-organization tool, a huge role in Google+. There are two top bars in the middle panel: one has buttons to upload photos from your iPad’s camera and library, the other two are associated with a regular status update and check-ins. In the blue toolbar, the app has a series of additional icons to open the friend requests panel, messages, and notifications — this looks very similar to Facebook on the desktop, and the design is very distant from Facebook’s implementation on the iPhone. There is also a search function in the app, though it’s been placed at the top of the sidebar, rather than the toolbar.

We’ll have a more detailed look at Facebook’s iPad client as we get to play with it in the next few hours. Another prominent feature of today’s Facebook’s releases is app discovery and integration with mobile browsers — basically what used to be called Project Spartan in the weeks leading up to the iPad app’s release. The Facebook app now allows users to tap on links shared on the News Feed by specific apps, like Words with Friends, and if the app is already installed on the device and recognized by Facebook, it’ll launch it. If the app isn’t installed but available on the App Store, Facebook will forward the link to the App Store; if no App Store version is available, Facebook will try to load a new HTML5 version as part of a partnership with several developers to bring Facebook apps to mobile browsers. Previously, many Facebook apps had to be written in Flash to run on Facebook’s website, and this limitation made them incompatible with Apple’s devices and Safari browser, which don’t support Flash. AllThingsD shares more information on this new web initiative from Facebook:

The combined native and Web app experience is only available on iOS for now. On Android and other phones with Web browsers, users will default to the Web experience. Facebook CTO Bret Taylor told AllThingsD today that Facebook is also working on an update to its native Android application.

On the downside, there’s one place Facebook wasn’t able to negotiate a consistent experience for users: payments. This was a major sticking point in ongoing discussions with Apple, as I’d written last week. Facebook Credits can’t be used to pay for virtual goods within in native iOS apps or mobile Web apps running within a Facebook app on iOS. Instead, users will have to buy separate in-app currency through Apple’s own in-app payment system.

Facebook notes that there are some missing features from its iPad client such as the ticker, a recently launched interface to access your friends’ recent activity from a sidebar on Facebook’s website. Facebook says the ticker couldn’t be implemented on the iPad due to time constraints and limited real screen estate. For this first release, Facebook is putting the focus on photos, available in high-res thanks to the iPad’s screen, games and simplified navigation, which allows you to switch between posts, friends updates and messages with a few taps through the iPad’s interface.

The new Facebook mobile interface is also live through Safari on iOS; the mobile website has received several updates detailed in this blog post, and it borrows heavily from UI elements of the iPad app released today, with a toolbar for friend requests, messages and notifications, and “bookmarks” on the left to search, open your profile, pages, News Feed, and so forth.

With the new Requests dialog for mobile, users can invite their friends to your app. Friends can receive requests anywhere that your app is supported. For example, if a user plays a move in a game on Facebook.com, their friend can respond from her iPhone. As with bookmarks, users will tap the notification and land directly on the mobile version of your app, whether it is a native iOS app or a mobile web app.

Navigation on the new mobile website has been dramatically improved with this update — switching between sections doesn’t reload the entire webpage and it makes for a faster, more pleasant mobile browsing experience. An obvious advantage of the native Facebook apps remains camera access and chat, which the mobile web version still can’t provide through Safari and other mobile browsers.

You can find Facebook for iPad here, and check out Facebook’s new mobile web view at m.facebook.com.

Update: I’ve been playing with the Facebook iPad app, and I’m fairly impressed with how the final version turned out to be — clearly, the app that leaked this summer was a development build that wasn’t ready for primetime. The News Feed design is clean and simple, but unfortunately it’s also the only section that lagged a bit in performances on my iPad 2 with iOS 5: the News Feed’s scrolling isn’t terribly smooth, certainly not as fluid as scrolling through a user’s profile, the Messages window or a Facebook page. I assume Facebook will make changes in the next few weeks to make the News Feed as smooth as possible. Another thing I didn’t particularly like is the Settings window, which isn’t iPad optimized and looks strange on the big screen.

But everything else is quite impressive in this first iPad app. You can have chat conversations with multiple contacts as you’d normally do, and keep the conversations going either by using the Chat sidebar or the unified Messages view. When a contact pings you in Chat, Facebook brings him/her at the top of the list so you can easily respond; unlike Facebook.com, chats aren’t displayed as open “tabs” along the bottom — they’re listed at the top of the Chat sidebar and you can go back and forth between them by tapping on them.

It appears Facebook has given much importance to gestures in this iPad release: you can swipe to open the left sidebar (the one that displays Search, Favorites, Apps and Pages) and swipe to navigate back to previous screens. For instance, you can open your profile from the News Feed, check out something on your profile, then swipe back to the News Feed. Animations are quite fast and responsive. Profiles’ design is extremely simple, with tabs on the left to access the Wall, Info screen, Photos and Friends. These last two items are presented with a typical iPad grid interface, and you can pinch to open photos (or swipe to navigate between them in full-screen). You can add a new friend from the Profile view or, if you’re already friends with someone, tap on the action button in the upper right corner to Send a Message, Chat, Poke and Unfriend. While on a friend’s profile, you can obviously like and comment on posts too, and the buttons to perform such actions have been moved into a single + icon next to each post.

The most visible interface elements of the new Facebook app are the sidebar and toolbar. The upper toolbar, just like Facebook’s website, contains buttons to see Friend requests, messages and notifications. While the updated Facebook mobile website had to recreate Apple’s popover menus inside Mobile Safari, Facebook for iPad features native popover menus to check out requests and notifications; Facebook developers went as far as adding popover-based interaction for posting a new status update (with options to tag friends, insert location, attach a photo or video, and control privacy settings). Popovers work nicely in offering a quick glance at what’s new in your Facebook account, and a little red badge will sit next to them for a missed notification or friend request. When you tap on a notification for someone that liked or commented on a post of yours, Facebook won’t take you to a single page for that comment thread — it’ll open a sidebar allowing you to comment back. Messages, too, when accessed from the upper toolbar won’t launch a dedicated page — they’ll enable you to reply from within the popover itself. It’s a nice touch that simplifies navigation by eliminating the need of constantly swiping through pages, and a huge advantage over the mobile website (which, as you can guess, doesn’t let you reply inside popovers like the iPad app — it’ll quickly reload a new page). Another nice addition to the Messages’ popover menu is the action button that lets you open a thread in the full Messages view, archive it, mark it as spam or unread. The main sidebar on the left, too, provides quick access to often-used Facebook sections with a few taps. Your friends, News Feed, Messages and Nearby check-ins will be listed here if you want to check them out. But the new addition in this 4.0 release is the aforementioned app discovery: apps that have been connected with your Facebook account will show up as entries in the Apps section of the sidebar. Tapping on these apps will launch them if already installed on the device, or open the App Store. Which brings me to the also-updated Facebook app for iPhone.

Facebook for iPhone has received a massive overhaul that makes the app look a bit like the iPad version and new mobile website (screenshots below). Unlike the mobile website, however, items in the top toolbar won’t open in popover menus: Facebook for iPhone loads new full-screen windows for them, and I assume it’s because popovers are native to the iPad’s SDK, not the iPhone’s. The fact that Facebook was able to implement popovers on the iPhone’s web UI clearly shows the different kind of control the web gives Facebook. However, small technical differences aside, Facebook 4.0 on the iPhone looks very similar to its web counterpart. The sidebar is the same, basic navigation concepts are the same, and apps are listed in the sidebar. And because on my iPhone I have some third-party apps that are connected to Facebook, I was able to launch them directly from the iPhone app’s new sidebar. I tapped on Instagram and Shazam, and Facebook for iPhone launched them directly. Other apps that weren’t installed forced Facebook to open the App Store link instead.

Overall, I have the feeling Facebook did something very good this time. The technologies used in the mobile website make for a better experience and unify the Facebook user interface across devices; the new iOS app is more polished, faster to navigate, and it’s got the same obvious perks like chat and camera access. The iPad app is especially easy to use thanks to gestures and the bigger screen, which makes everything more readable and “organized”. The iOS app could still use some tweaks (especially in scrolling the News Feed), but I believe version 4.0 is a huge step forward for Facebook, and the mobile interface is a platform we should keep an eye on in the next months.

Find a gallery of screenshots below.

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Quora, the question-and-answer website publicly launched in summer 2010, has released its first official iPhone app today, free on the App Store. For those not familiar with Quora, it’s a community-driven resource for answers on a variety of topics including technology, science, sports, media, health, and more. Quora aggregates topics and questions, allowing users to collaborate on them and vote the best answer to a specific question. Each “author” has a profile with detailed stats for recent posts and answers, activity and “related answers”. Quora has been widely regarded as a revolutionary knowledge platform comparable to Wikipedia.

The iPhone app brings many of the features that made Quora popular on mobile devices (the app also runs on the iPod touch) and adds a “nearby feature” to browse topics on a map, add or answer questions about a place near you, or simply explore questions on a map overlay. You can view your profile, ask and answer questions, or read your feed for interesting questions and topics you might want to follow.

The developers of the Quora app write:

When Neeraj Agrawal and I started working on the app earlier this year, we spent a lot of time thinking about how to translate both the experience and the technology of Quora to a mobile platform. We rethought the design from the ground up and worked hard to make it fast and native while strengthening the core product. Now, just like on the Quora web site, you can read your feed, search and add questions, check your notifications and add answers and posts.

We’ve also made existing features like Shuffle even better. You can find Shuffle at the bottom of your feed. It’s perfect for surfacing even more great content when you’re stuck at a bus stop and looking for something to read.

Quora for iPhone is available for free on the App Store.

Following the Cosmic Panda experimental design launched in July, it appears YouTube is now testing an updated mobile layout that borrows some of the color schemes and interface elements of this summer’s refresh for desktop web browsers. The new mobile layout can be enabled at m.youtube.com/new_visual_design, and I’ve noticed this by opening the YouTube website from my iPhone (running the latest iOS 5 beta, but it works on iOS 4 too) earlier today. A quick Google and Twitter search seems to confirm that the new mobile layout is a recent change that, similarly to Cosmic Panda, is opt-in and needs to be manually activated.

Once enabled, the new design brings a much darker color palette that presents videos against dark toolbars and buttons — I assume this should make videos a little easier on the eye, but the effect is sort of ruined by Safari’s blue address bar. Unlike the standard mobile layout, launched last year, when saving this new design to the iPhone’s Home screen you won’t get a Retina-ready icon or full-screen web app. This, again, should be related to the experimental nature of the design.

The new mobile layout brings updated buttons and a new toolbar to toggle HQ on videos, give them a thumbs up/down, and share them. The HQ toggle comes with a neat fading animation and the video thumbnail has new loading and Play controls, too. (more…)

A major update to the official Google+ app for iOS has been released on the App Store, and it adds the features mentioned by Google earlier this week when the service hit official “beta” status (open to everyone) after a limited field-trial period. As previously announced by Google, the mobile app for iOS now comes with Hangouts support — meaning that you’ll be able to join a Hangout directly from your iPhone or iPod touch. I haven’t been able to test this yet as none of my friends is currently streaming a Hangout session, so I can’t comment on the app’s performances with video yet. When covering the functionality for the Android app, however, Google wrote:

In life we connect with others in all sorts of places, at all different times. And the connections you make unexpectedly are often the ones you remember the most. We think Hangouts should keep pace with how you socialize in the real-world, so today we’re launching it on the one device that’s always by your side: your mobile phone. To get started, simply find an active hangout in the Stream, and tap “Join”.

The most notable change as you fire up the updated app is Huddle, which has been renamed to Messenger and now supports photos. You can easily attach photos from your Library or snap new ones within a Messenger thread, and Google claims there have been some reliability improvements as well.

Throughout the app, I’ve spotted several optimizations that should make the mobile Google+ experience more enjoyable. For one, granular controls on notification settings now allow you to selectively receive push notifications for mentions, shares, comments, or comments on a post after you commented. You can also be notified about new people circling you, and new tags or comments on photos. Considering iOS 5′s upcoming Notification Center functionality, these changes should make for an optimal experience when dealing with the incoming stream of notifications from Google+.

Other improvements in Google+ for iOS include the possibility to +1 comments, a map view in the profile for places you’ve lived, and a new feature to share posts with individuals only, instead of circles. Furthermore, Google mentions improvements to search in the changelog, and better support for +mentions (in the compose view, you’ll get a popup dialog to pick users, similar to Twitter).

The new Google+ update for iPhone feels like an important step forward in bringing the app up to parity with the website, as well as the mobile Android client. You can get it here on the App Store.

Update: I’ve run some first mobile Hangout tests, and performances seemed pretty reliably on my home network. Video quality was slightly worse than Apple’s FaceTime on the same connection, but it was a very slightly difference. What matters is that you’re able to join a Hangout directly from your stream as one of your friend starts it, and as you click “Join” you’ll be brought to a new dark screen that will load your camera view (front-facing by default), as well as your friend’s. There are notifications for new people joining a Hangout, and as multiple members join you can open a new screen to instantly add them to a circle.  There are buttons in a bottom toolbar to mute audio, freeze the camera, switch between front and rear-facing cameras, and leave the Hangout.

Overall, the process of joining a Hangout from my iPhone was pretty smooth, though on my friend’s end, she told me she was logged out at some time, and had to re-enter the Hangout. During those few seconds, I was left alone with a black screen as you can see in an image below. Hangouts on desktop web browsers have been recently enhanced with new features as you can read in Google’s blog post.

In the past months, Google has released a series of updates to improve the overall experience of the Gmail mobile web app, which works on iOS devices such as the iPhone and iPad, as well as other smartphones and tablets. Google made the mobile web app more accessible and usable with notifications, undo bar, Retina graphics and “pull to refresh”, and today they’ve announced another update that brings Preferences and multiple sign-in to the service when viewed from mobile devices.

Multiple sign-in has been around in the Gmail desktop website for quite some time, and it’s a useful shortcut to quickly switch between multiple Google accounts (and thus Gmail inboxes or Google+ profiles). Starting today, a new sign-in button will appear at the bottom of the iOS web app, allowing you to jump to another account, which will automatically load its Gmail inbox. The feature is already live in Mobile Safari (tested on an iPhone 4 running the latest iOS 5 beta).

Furthermore, Google is now allowing users to set Preferences directly from the mobile web app. The company is highlighting the possibility to create a mobile-only signature, so your friends will associate typos to a smartphone’s keyboard. Also, the Preferences come with vacation auto-responder settings, and a few more options.

We know that autocorrect and other mobile spell-checks can be frustrating as you are typing on the go. Let your friends know that you are responding via your mobile phone so that they understand why you might have sent a message that you are meeting for “monitors” and not “mojitos”. It’s an easy way to make them understand why your message might be short or have a few typos. To create a mobile signature, from the menu view, press the new settings icon, choose your signature, and then check the box that tells us you want to activate it. If you ever want to disable the mobile signature, you can uncheck the box and we will use your desktop signature instead.

Google notes that each Gmail account can have a separate bookmark. On iOS devices, you can save a Gmail shortcut to the Home screen by tapping on the Action icon in Mobile Safari, and then Add to Home Screen (Gmail’s webclip icon has been optimized for the Retina Display as well).

Officially announced by Square in May, the company’s first Card Case app for iPhone is now available for free on the App Store, alongside an update to the official Square app that brings improved transaction speed, new tipping interface, and no signatures for transactions less than $25. Square, the mobile payment service that based its success on iOS apps and a mobile “card reader” that plugs directly into iOS devices’ headphone jack, detailed its plans to take over traditional wallets, credit cards and receipts with two new products, the aforementioned Card Case and Register for merchants.

Card Case is a digital wallet, a separate app available exclusively on the iPhone, that allows users to easily pay at their favorite local merchants with a few taps. By eliminating the need for cash, or real credit cards to carry around in a physical wallet, Card Case lives on the iPhone and collects different tabs associated to a user’s name and currently open at selected merchants. When it’s time to pay, instead of using cash or a credit card, merchants using Square can ask customers for their names, and have the Card Case app take care of the rest. Card Case lets you explore new and nearby places, keeps a list of recent transactions and paperless receipts which are automatically emailed after a transaction. (more…)

Google has just released the official Google+ app for iPhone on the App Store. The app is free and available here, and at the moment of writing this Google hasn’t updated its Mobile webpage to showcase the new app yet.

The Google+ iOS app provides a native interface to access much of the functionalities of the website, such as the Huddle group messaging feature — which was exclusive to Android devices prior to the app’s approval. The dashboard of the Google+ app presents a grid of icons to access the Stream, Huddle, Photos, your Profile and Circles, as well as a Notifications tab at the bottom that will open a vertical list of all your incoming notifications. Whilst much of the navigation seems to rely on web views optimized for the iPhone and fetched by the device, the animations when switching between sections are quite snappy and fast on iOS 4. Just like on the desktop, the Stream provides recent updates from the people you follow and your Circles, allowing you to check for new posts with the popular “pull to refresh gesture” and comment or +1 others’s posts. You can’t +1 from the home page — you have to open a single post and hit the + button in the upper right corner, while a text field at the bottom will let you leave a comment. You can also “mute” or “report” a post. The app is capable of sending push notifications for new comments, shares, and so forth. (more…)

As noted by some of our readers overnight, Google is rolling out a revamped search interface which better showcases all the services offered by Google and allows you to easily and quickly switch between Search, Images, Gmail, Blogs and more. The new page design is not available for everyone (I can’t see it on my iPhone 4 in Italy), as it’s apparently slowly propagating internationally. MacStories reader Kevin, however, managed to grab some screenshots of the updated mobile interface; a new bar at the top provides links to Google Search, Images, Blogs and Gmail, and a “more” button to expand the bar and reveal the icons seen in the screenshots above. Another section of the new top bar displays the Google account you’re currently logged in with, as well as two tabs for Search and Apps. In the Apps section, Google has a Gmail shortcut that takes you to the usual mobile mail interface for iOS devices. Other services are likely visible in the Search tab of international Google domains, as our reader could only see the new design on Google.lu.

Google has updated several of its online services and web apps over the past months to be more functional on iOS and Android devices. Together with Instant and App Store search results, Google made lots of changes to Gmail mobile, improved the weather widget and completely revamped the Maps web app last week. Check out more screenshots below. [Thanks, Kevin] (more…)

With an official blog post that went live a few minutes ago, Twitter has announced they’re slowly rolling out an updated version of their web app for mobile devices — this time redesigned to resemble the Twitter app for iPhone, but with a tab bar on top, and to feature more HTML5 integration. The web app allows you to quickly scroll the timeline, switch between tabs, check out your profile and even direct messages without leaving Mobile Safari.

We want you to be able to access Twitter no matter where you are; regardless of what device you use; or, whether you prefer to access Twitter through a mobile application or the browser. Today, we’re starting to roll out a new version of twitter.com for mobile devices. This web app allows us to provide a high-quality and consistent Twitter experience on high-end touchscreen devices – whether or not an official Twitter application is available. It was built from the ground up for smartphones and tablets, which have more advanced browsers that support the latest web technologies, including HTML5.

The new web app works on the iPhone, iPod touch and Android handsets, but it’s being rolled out to a small percentage of users today, with more following in the next weeks. Whilst the redesign looks good from the screenshots, there are still some obvious perks in using the native iPhone app, such as inline browsing for media and links or image and video uploading functionalities. Still, this looks like a major improvement over the old version, and we hope Twitter will be faster in rolling it out to all users than they did with #NewTwitter.