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| Steve Jobs shows off the white iPad 2 in San Francisco March 3, 2011. Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired As the release of Apple's next iPad looms closer, rumors about the tablet's specs and features are growing in frequency and intensity. Last Friday, Bloomberg reported the iPad 3 will include a quad-core chip and LTE support, and make landfall in March, complete with a high-resolution display. But the very latest speculation concerns not Apple hardware, but iOS and its relationship to social media. Inside the most recent iOS 5.1 beta, alongside two iPad 3 code names (J1AP and J2AP), there are multiple references to Facebook, suggesting an upcoming version of iOS 5 will have deep Facebook integration. Currently, iOS 5 only has built-in Twitter integration. Objective-C developer @jackoplane first publicized the Facebook mentions, according to the blog iMore. The code snippets were discovered in iOS 5.1 beta 3. Technology giants Facebook and Apple have had an on-again, off-again love affair over the past few years. After Steve Jobs' death, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg referred to Apple's former CEO as a “mentor and a friend.” Much more publicly, however, Apple and Facebook have bumped heads over Apple's music-centric social network, Ping, and Facebook recently rolled out its Timeline feature for Android before iOS. And this isn't the first time hints of Facebook integration have been found deep within iOS source code. Rumors that Facebook could be built into iOS 4 surfaced around May of last year. That code disappeared in later iOS betas — until now, it seems. via Cult of Mac | |
