Hasta La Gadget!

Facebook has appointed another female member to its board of directors. Susan Desmond-Hellmann has just been initiated as a Facebook director. She, and COO Sheryl Sandberg, are the only two female directors in Facebook’s 9-member board. Desmond-Hellmann is also currently the chancellor of the University of California in San Francisco. She brings with her an impressive resume to Facebook’s group.

Desmond-Hellmann oversees UCSF’s medical center’s strategy and operations. In 2012, under her watch, UCSC was ranked #2 in clinical medicine and pharmacy. She is also a director at Procter & Gamble Co., a huge manufacturer of a variety of personal and healthcare products. She served as the President of Product Development for 14 years at Genentech Inc., a biotech company. Last, but most certainly not least, she is a trustee for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Desmond-Hellman brings a wide background of experience that will help Facebook in its future decisions. Mark Zuckerberg said, “Sue has a great track record of building and managing a diverse set of organizations, so her insights will be valuable as we continue to expand into new areas.” Zuckerberg says that adding her to the board will make Facebook a stronger company, and that she fits well with the other members of the board.

Facebook is certainly working extra hard to push its business to the next level. It’s improving its marketing campaigns with new features, and is making acquisitions to improve its services. It also created a mobile training program to better prepare its employees for mobile projects. The new training program is a strong step forward with Facebook planning on becoming a more mobile-centric company.

[via Bloomberg]

Facebook adds UCSF chancellor to its board of directors is written by Brian Sin & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Don’t get too excited – this is just a designer’s concept.

Facebook is preparing to unveil changes it’s made to its News Feed tomorrow, but it looks like we may have caught a glimpse of what the company is planning to showcase tomorrow in a story we published last week. Facebook began testing out a new Timeline layout in New Zealand that would do away with the dual-column layout to replace it with a hybrid which would have the person’s information to the left of their profile, while their status updates would be located on the right side.

This doesn’t seem to be the only change Facebook will be making as we can also expect multiple news feeds based on categories, such as music your friends are listening to or images shared on Instagram. In addition to that, we could also expected larger photos to be displayed on Facebook as well as image-based advertisements. (more…)

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: KFC Offering Free Wi-Fi At All U.K. Restaurants, Internet Proxy Weddings On The Rise,

We’ve already had one major Facebook press event this year for the launch of Open Graph personalized search features but according to TechCrunch, another one later this week will herald the arrival of a revamped news feed. The new main page will filter content by type to pull out photos, music, with larger images overall and larger images for advertisements. The mockup shown above is based on information distilled from various sources that indicates the social network’s plan is to put currently buried feeds like Pages users have liked in a more central and easier to access area, along with information pulled in by the ever expanding number of services linked to one’s Facebook ID. What isn’t confirmed however, according to the TechCrunch rumor are revamp views for the mobile apps, despite the company’s stated plan to go “mobile best” in 2013. Hit the source link for more details on how your mother will be keeping tabs on you in the near future.

Filed under: Internet, Facebook

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Source: TechCrunch

Android’s flavor of Facebook Messenger has just been updated with VoIP functionality for the social network’s Canadian users. There’s no word when Android faithful in the US will snag the functionality, but Canucks can at least ring their American counterparts who wield the iOS app. Version 2.3 of the mobile messenger also makes group conversations accessible in the sidebar, allows them to be named from the top of a talk and makes them searchable by name and friends. Hit the neighboring source link to grab the revamped software.

Filed under: Cellphones, Tablets, Software, Mobile, Facebook

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Via: TechCrunch

Source: Facebook Messenger (Google Play)

Facebook developers had faced many challenges when developing their app for older platforms like Android 2.2 Froyo and Android 2.3 Gingerbread. When Facebook completely revamped its app last year to provide a better user experience, they discovered that the app did not play well with older Android devices. They discovered that the problem had to do with a program called “dexopt” which determines a fixed-size buffer called “LinearAlloc” of apps installed on a specific device. While the buffer size is 8 or 16 MB in size for newer Android versions like Ice Cream Sandwich and Jelly Bean, its only 5 MB in the older versions.

The group was able to come up with a solution by injecting secondary dex files directly into the Android class loader, but then another problem appeared. It turns out that the Facebook app would crash immediately after startup because it had surpassed the method limit set by Android’s virtual machine, Dalvik. The team was at a stand-still, unsure what they could do to fix the problem. They thought that they would have to cut out various features in their Facebook 2.0 app, or just restrict the revamped app to devices with newer versions of Android.

The developers thought “if we could only increase that buffer from 5 MB to 8 MB, we would be safe!”. They realized that they needed to find the LinearAllocHdr object, “lock it, and replace the buffer.” They then had an idea of using a JNI extension to replace the existing buffer with a bigger one. They found the proper value in the vmList using the JavaVM pointer in JNI, they scanned the DvmGlobals object to find the match, found the LinearAlloc header and replaced the buffer. They were able to build the JNI extension and implement it into the Facebook app.

They ran into a small issue with the Samsung Galaxy S II, which they dubbed as “the most popular Gingerbread phone of all time”. The buffer size was 4 bytes off, so they had to safely scan the process heap to search for the correct buffer. After they found the fix, they created a test app, and with the help of manual testing, DeviceAnywhere, and a Google test lab, they were able to test their new Facebook app on 70 different Android devices. To their relief, the app successfully worked on each device.

The team thanks Google and Android for being an open source platform. If the platform wasn’t open, they wouldn’t have been able to “ship our best version of the app”. Facebook also has its extensive training program to thank for that. The program, which was started last year, helped many Facebook staff members discover the reasoning behind the Gingerbread/Facebook debacle.

[via Facebook]

How Facebook fixed its Gingerbread Dalvik problem is written by Brian Sin & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.