This post will explain how to use a new component within the Facebook SDK iOS; I am talking about FBLoginView.
Facebook SDK for iOS has seen several updates and improvements during the last year. During my first project I was asked to refactor the authentication flow, such as login and logout.
Most times in your application a solid unit test trumps testing your UI. But that’s no reason to neglect your UI from having to endure the same rigorous testing you give your models. “But I don’t have time to sit around and tap every part of my application.”, you say. Enter Automation…
As Facebook integration into iOS comes along, it feels like all applications must integrate social features. Having the ability to review your Facebook friends list within your app is one of the most important social features. Sharing the app or posts from within the app with friends is one of the best ways to virally spread the product among several people.
One of my recent projects required upgrading the Facebook SDK to the latest version, 3.1. It was using Version 2.0.
If you’re an iPhone user, you must be glad that there are apps for just about anything. In fact, as of this writing, Apple’s App Store website boasts that it now has more than 500,000 apps. Impressive.
Animations are one of the cornerstones of the iOS platform. Animations can add polish and visual interest to any application.
iOS comes with many default animations and effects. An animation between two views is referred to as a transition.
On a recent project, we needed to create an animation of a card to make it appear spinning. Creating this effect from scratch would involve a fair amount of code, but leveraging transitions made it easy.
When building an iOS application there are times when the best solution for a particular view or screen is to build it as a webpage and then embed it into the app using a UIWebView. There are certain things a webview can do really well that are otherwise hard to replicate, and while not as sexy, web development can be much quicker than native iOS development. The specifics of when to use a webview and when to go native I won’t dive into, but if you decide to use a webview, the first major question you’ll probably wonder is how to communicate between the native app and the webview. For full integration into the app, being able to send messages from the JavaScript to Objective-C and back is critical, and luckily it’s quite easy.
Flipboard, iPad app of the year in 2010.
Sporting a very intuitive interface, flipboard is still an inspiration for designing applications.
A few months ago, we were asked to create a showcase iOS web app. Among the requested features, was to give it a flipboard effect.
Apple provides a convinient class, UIImagePickerController, that easily allows your app to display a user interface to pick an image from the photo library. There are countless apps out there that utilize this class. Since this class manages all the user interactions, end-users of the apps that use it will find consistency when picking an image from photo library. Facebook iOS app, WhatsApp text messenger, Messages and Tweetbot are just a few popular apps that leverage this class. It’d be great had Apple provided a similar class for picking a photo from a Facebook account.
The official Facebook iOS SDK provides an easy way for any iOS applications to authenticate against a Facebook account. If you follow this tutorial, you’ll be able to add facebook authentication in your app in less than 15 minutes. It’s that simple. Once your app has been authenticated, it will possess both access token and expiration date. These two pieces of data will be used in subsequent communication with Facebook.
I’m a loyal user of iPhone. I’ve been using it since its first version and now I’m on 4S. Though I’m staying in iOS camp and don’t have any intention of moving, I occasionally get the urge to test out and see what’s out there. That’s the reason why I convinced myself to own and play with Dell Streak 5″ phone and Google Nexus S. They are both smart smart-phones. But it’s hard to pick their pros and cons by simply “playing” with it. You’ve got to use it. Daily. For everything including surfing, speed dialing, social-networking and games. Everything. And that’s something that I didn’t get a chance to do until last summer when I was traveling and in need of an unlocked phone. I could make my iPhone work (don’t ask me how) but thought I’d give an Android phone a real kick.