Facebook for iOS version 4.0 - Upgrade Issues

People updating their Facebook app on iPhone to version 4.0 might experience "freezes" and "lockups" after launching the app. The blue Facebook launch screen (sometimes with the spinning icon) will persist, though nothing further seems to happen. In some cases even the "Home" and "Power" button will stop responding causing the phone to lock up completely.

The only solution is to wait for the iPhone to "recover" (usually after the SpingBoard crashes and relaunches itself),  and follow these steps after you regain control over the device:

• Double-click the Home button to display recently used apps
• Hold one of those apps, until they all start to wiggle
• Close all the recently used apps
• Click the Home button to stop the wiggling
• Click the Home button again to close the recently used apps
• Hold the Facebook app, till all the apps start wiggling
• Delete the Facebook app (and all of its data)
• Power off the iPhone by pressing (and holding) the Power button
• Restart the iPhone by pressing the Power button
• Re-install the Facebook app using the App Store app on the iPhone
• Launch the Facebook app
• Provide your Email/Password and log in

Note: Seemingly only the iPhone and iPod Touch are affected (not the iPad), and only when upgrading the Facebook app

Checksums for official iOS builds (SHA1)

Apple sure doesn't make it very easy if you're one of the iOS users that prefers to roll back to a prior release on your iPod Touch, iPhone or iPad. Even if you were able to save the SHSH blob for your device in combination with a certain build in Cydia or by using TinyUmbrella, you would still need to get the binary firmware bits from Apple. Just in case you happened to have gotten a build from a different source, here's where you can get SHA1's for the official releases. Simply run this command on the file (in OS X) and compare it to this list:

/usr/bin/openssl sha1 /Users/test/Downloads/iPhone2,1_4.1_8B117_Restore.ipsw

Gmail, IE8 and Content-Disposition attachment

For a while now Gmail makes use of a very user-friendly way to show picture attachments in e-mails.

The "View" link allows you to look at the photo within the browser, and the "Download" link causes the file to be saved to your local harddrive. For the novice user this type of "preview" with clear indications on how to look at, and how to save the file is way more intuitive than the commonly used paperclip icon.

Intrigued by this design I wondered if one could create a rich text e-mail with some CSS and provide the same type of "user interface", but instead of attaching the file, include links to a cloud service (e.g. Amazon S3). That way you can shift the load of the attachments from the e-mail server to the cloud service, process more e-mails in a shorter amount of time, and get the e-mail quicker to the customer (in case of a photo service).

The implementation was fairly simple: include a thumbnail, and create two links to Amazon S3. The "View" link would connect to a URL on S3 with the metadata Content-Disposition set to inline. And the "Download" link would associate with a URL on S3 with the metadata Content-Disposition set to attachment. It worked fine except for one case: Gmail in combination with Internet Explorer. When clicking the "Download" link, Gmail seems to get completely confused and unless you completely shut down IE, there is no way to get back to your inbox.

These are the steps I used to produce the issue:

1. Open Hotmail (or any other mail client that allows sending Rich Text e-mails with hyperlinks).
2. Compose a message with a hyperlink to: https://s3.amazonaws.com/lautumar.bug/ie8_gmail_bug.jpg
   
   
   
   
   
3. This link refers to a file on Amazon S3 with the Content-Disposition set to attachment.
   
   
   
   
   
4. Send this e-mail to a Gmail account.
5. Open Internet Explorer, surf to http://www.gmail.com and log in.
6. Open the e-mail message you composed earlier.
7. Click on the hyperlink pointed to S3.
8. With the default security settings, a new window will open but with the following security warning "To help protect your security, Internet Explorer blocked this site from downloading files to your computer. Click here for options.".
   
   
   
   
   
9. Click on the message and choose "Download File...".
10. The window will now show "Copyright 2002-2010 Google Inc." with a bunch of javascript errors. No file gets downloaded.
    
    
    
    
    
11. More importantly when trying to access Gmail  by typing http://www.gmail.com in the address bar you will now get "Connection Problem" in IE. Or simply get logged out of Gmail.
    
    
    
    
    
12. The only way to get Gmail to work is to shutdown and restart IE.

For those interested in following the status on this issue: there's a bug report on the Gmail Help Forum where you can "Star" the problem and stay up to date.