chatheads

Two 'chatheads' stories April 2013

Richard Williamson, former Apple executive who led Maps team, Loren Brichter join Facebook

According to Bloomberg‘s Adam Satariano, Richard Williamson has joined Facebook. We’ve independently heard the same. Williamson is a former iOS executive from Apple who was reportedly terminated over Apple Maps. Williamson ran Apple’s iOS 6 Maps team and also worked on Siri features.

Williamson joined Facebook in the past couple of weeks to be a manager within its expanding mobile-software group, said two of the people, who declined to be identified because the information isn’t public.

Facebook’s hire of Williamson is notable as the social network reportedly has hired several former Apple engineers to work on various projects, including the Facebook Home software and various other mobile applications. Williamson’s hire marks one of the more high-profile hires of former Apple employees.

Following up on this morning’s news that Loren Brichter is working with Facebook some capacity, Bloomberg also notes that the company has actually hired the Letterpress developer and former Apple employee as a consultant.

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Here’s how to enable Chat Heads and Stickers in the new Facebook app right now

When Facebook released their brand-new iOS application today, some were disappointed to find that the highlight features of Chat Heads (from Facebook Home) and Stickers were not present. Facebook says that the two features, like many other of Facebook’s recently released products, will be released via a staggered rollout.

For those who truly want to enable Chat Heads and Stickers before Facebook wants it on your iOS device, iMore‘s Nick Arnott has put together a thorough tutorial on how to enable the features. Follow the steps, grab an app called PhoneView (no jailbreak required), and a Plist editor (like the one included in Xcode), and you should be good to go. We’ve tested the Chat Heads trick, and it works well.