UPDATE: I updated a couple of the images and wording to coincide with the newest Facebook design. Let me know if anything is still “off”.

I get a lot of questions about how to use Facebook’s new (ish) privacy features so I thought I’d go through a quick 101 tutorial on settings things up and using them effectively. I’ll try and keep this as simple and quick as possible but I will also be covering all you really need to know about keeping your Facebook profile and the information you post on it safe.

Where do we start? We need to create some friends Lists. A friends List on Facebook is just a collection of friends for your eyes only. Your friends will never know what lists they are in (unless you tell them) so they’re just for you. If you really WANT to go all out and create that “Assholes” list, feel free without worrying about a thing. Follow the pictures and this should go swimmingly.

Select Account -> Edit Friends from the top menu of Facebook

Here is your friends page! This page will recommend friends to you as well as give you various methods of organizing them. We want to view ALL of our friends right now..

Select Friends from the left side under Lists

There we go. Now we have all of our friends to look at. Let’s start organizing them by creating a new list…

Read the Rest

The new year is hours away. Even though I know time is relative and that flipping a calendar to a new year doesn’t actually mean anything in the grand sceme of things, for some reason there’s comfort in it. Here’s a few of the things I’m looking forward to in 2010..

Movies/TV: The Lovely Bones, Kick-Ass, Harry Potter, Lost, Alice in Wonderland, Social Network, Always Sunny In Philadelphia..

Technology: New iPhone, Apple Tablet (Not that I’ll get one, just to see what it’s all about), CES..

Goals: Knock out the few iPhone app ideas I have floating around in my head right now, Think of more ideas and knock those out, Get some freelancing started, Move.

Short list, I know.. Just threw this together real quick off the top of my head. I really am looking forward to the new year, though. I hope everyone’s deployments into 2010 goes swimmingly and I hope everyone stays safe. Happy New Year!

An update to iPregnancyTest was just approved by apple that includes a couple of tweaks here and there. There’s a one time notice about iPregnancyTest’s support for Facebook that reminds you to log in so we can use your Facebook friends as a basis for the Baby-Daddy Generator. Speaking of the Baby-Daddy Generator, there’s also a new “Baby-Daddy Generator Preview” feature that allows you to see who our “super scientific tests” have determined to be the Baby-Daddy before launching Mail or asking for your permission to post a feed story to Facebook. Update your apps now or, if your don’t already own iPregnancyTest, pick it up from the App Store now.

My iPhone started acting up a couple of days ago. Any time the screen went blank (either via auto-lock or if I manually hit the lock switch) it took about 30 seconds and the iPhone would just shut itself off. If I turned off auto-lock, the phone stayed on for as long as it could (battery dependent, of course). It also only seemed to have this problem when running on battery power. Very strange problem, indeed. I restored my phone and set it up as a new phone and thought that would clear it right up. It definitely did not.

Next step, set up an appointment at the Genius bar nearby so I could stop there before work that evening. I walked in and talked to a very nice Apple Genius. I explained my problem to him and he only really had one option that he could try on his end. He was going to “restore” the firmware in case something went wrong there. Alas, it was not looking good for me. Until the king gentleman said to me “Well.. your phone appears to be a couple months out of warranty…”. I had gotten my iPhone 3G the day it came out, so I already knew this. But then he went on to say ”.. but, we’re going to cover it for you. How about you just consider this a lucky day for you?”.

I was ecstatic! As much as I kind of want a 3GS, I figured I could make due with what I had until the NEW new iPhone came out later next year, but this plan was going to be thrown out the window if I had to subsidize another phone through AT&T as soon as they would let me. So now I should be able to make due with my iPhone 3G for another 7 months or so. Thank you Apple!

Which begs the question. With all the talk about iPhone killers lately, and all blackberry vs. android vs. iPhone debates, I can’t foresee a similar situation happening when you take your G1 or Droid or Whichever Blackberry 10 Billion that you have in after the warranty has expired and your experiencing some strange behavior. If you know anyone who has done this, I’d love to hear about it. I know it happens with much greater frequency with Apple products, though.

So, again, Thank you, Apple.

An update to Poke A Keith was pushed threw by Apple yesterday that includes OpenFeint support to add online achievements and leaderboards! There’s even a chatroom so you can talk with other Poke A Keith players or anyone on the OpenFeint network! Leaderboards let you compare your scores in a variety of categories with your OpenFeint friends as well as the world! It’s all available now so go get it!

Until today, the only options you had for private web browsing were either kind of shotty and thrown together really quick or much more expensive than anyone should pay for such a thing. Secret Browser was approved and released on the App Store today to solve those problems! I made sure to try and squash all the annoyances of other private browsers out there now as well as threw a very reasonable price tag on it. How does FREE sound? Head over to the App Store now and download Secret Browser. Let me know what you think!

P.S. You can also go ahead and follow @secretbrowser on twitter or just follow my twitter list for all of my apps!

Twitter just updated not too long ago with their new Lists feature and I thought it would make a great opportunity to create my own list of my iPhone apps and whatever other applications I create that could warrant a Twitter account. So check out my new Twitter List at http://twitter.com/swemoney/apps and follow the hell out of it!

Update: I changed the name of the list to just “apps” so it’s much easier to remember..

This just popped into my head while thinking about how shittastic my Comcast DVR is. Made me think about homebrew/open source DVR software. I have no experience at all with this and hell, this might even already exist, but wouldn’t it be cool if your DVR connects to a ‘commercial skip server’ that’s crowd sourced or maintained somehow. Basically, all it would store are timestamps for when commercials start and stop for the shows. If a show has commercial skip information when you go to watch your program, it could just automatically skip through the commercials and if it doesn’t, there could be an option for you to ‘mark’ where the commercials start and stop.. and after so many DVR’s mark a program, it gets verified and automatically skips commercials from then on. Just thought that would be cool to have in a DVR. What do you think?

I recently wrote about how the iPhone needs a better system for sending and viewing push notifications. My proposed system wasn’t a stretch at all, but it would take a little bit more work.. What if we got a very incremental update to the whole system first which would give Apple time to flesh out a great system for 4.0? My idea is dead simple (and I’m sure it’s been mentioned and thought about many times already).. Push Notifications seem to carry a lot of similarities to that of a Text Message.. Why doesn’t the iPhone just treat them as such and create a new Text Message in the Messages app for each app that’s sending push notifications? That’s all I got. Maybe include a little arrow on the right of each message to launch that app and see the notification in more detail. That’s all I got. I think it would be an easy to implement solution for the short term while they work on that huge location aware social steam thing we all read about quite a while ago.

Now that the MLB At Bat! 2009 app has added push notifications and my Cubbies are going to have to pull off one hell of a September in order to have a chance for the playoffs, I finally have an application that will be sending my iPhone a few push notifications every day about the results of the teams I need to lose. I’ve heard plenty of reports about how shitty the notifications on the iPhone are, but I’ve never really experienced any problems. So I started thinking about how they could be better and the first thing I thought about was the new Facebook 3.0 notifications. What if the iPhone used a system like this?

On the lock screen, there could be two options. One of them could be a very short and sweet kind of thing. Maybe even just a large icon showing that you have 5 new notifications or something. It would probably make sense that even in this view, more information is shown if you only have 1 or 2 notifications. Then, there should be a more detailed view that would take up the full screen and show an icon of the app that sent the notification as well as a short synopsis of the notification. It should be scrollable even when the phone is locked but it shouldn’t be possible to activate anything until you unlock the phone.

Then when the phone is unlocked is where I think Apple could take a hint from Facebook on this one. When you have a notification, the icons on the springboard might nudge up a little bit to make room for a bar on the bottom of the screen that shows how many notifications you have. When you touch the bar, it expands to show all your notifications and lets you interact with them however you wish. Then just add a ‘read’ status to all the notifications that would allow the bar to stay present until your completely done reading through all your notifications.

That’s really all I got. I’m sure Apple is already working on something for 3.5 or 4.0 or something of the iPhone OS. What does anyone else think about this idea?