Borrowing from its desktop layout, the interface of Facebook's iPad app was enhanced in an update with a sidebar that links users to other popular games and other entertainment served up by the social networking company.
Developers sectioned the sidebar off into panes for notifications, trending topics, trending videos, recently played games and popular games. The app's new sidebar, introduced June 16, emerges onto the iPad's display in landscape view and retracts in portrait mode.
The notifications and "Trending" panes display all of the event reminders and hot topics found in the desktop variant of the sidebar -- the "Trending" section was beefed up for the iPad to include videos that have started going viral. The "My Games" and "Popular Games" tiles connects iPad users to pure entertainment, which was the apparent goal of releasing the sidebar.
As the popularity of mobile gaming continues to rise, the iPad app's sidebar will help users sort through the still-rising flood of games to find the ones they're likely to play for a significant amount of time. And playing games on Facebook has been a popular pasttime, according Victor Medeiros, a software engineer, who offered some insight about the sidebar on Facebook's blog for developers.
"More than 70 percent of people who use Facebook for iPad worldwide played a Facebook-connected game in the past 90 days," Medeiros stated on the developer's blog. "So we're also dedicating a section of the iPad app to games people play, and over time, we will include ads where game developers can engage players."
The sidebar will put iPad gamers in contact with promising games they might have missed otherwise, as the new sidebar will be used by game developers to advertise their new apps. Eligibility requirements for developers wanting to advertise in the sidebar include registration of their app on Facebook, an integrated Facebook login, and a video detailing the game in Facebook's App Center, according to the blog post from Medeiros.
While the Facebook's iPad apps takes some cues from the web version, the addition of the sidebar and game-centric panes helps to set it apart from the mobile version and assert its own personality.
Not everyone will get their fingerstips on the new sidebar just yet, as the new feature was considered a test by its developers, according to AppleInsider. The new sidebar for Facebook's iPad app was only released in the United States, but it wasn't clear if the update was rolled out across the entire country, according to the post from Medeiros.
