Aloha Cocoa

To celebrate the launch of Flickpad, we are giving away copies of Flickpad, Flickr Pro accounts, and an iPad!  Each day from today until Friday, we will post a message on Twitter. All you need to do is retweet the message and follow @flickpad, and you are automatically entered to win.  Each day, we will randomly select ten winners for a copy of Flickpad and one winner for a one year Flickr Pro account. Finally, on Friday, if we reach 815 or more followers, we will choose one lucky follower who will get Flickpad, a Flickr Pro account, and a brand new iPad!  You will be notified via direct message if you win.  Good luck and enjoy Flickpad.

Contest Rules:
1) You must have at least 10 Twitter followers to be eligible
2) One retweet enters you for all days of the contest
3) Multiple/Excessive entries will make you ineligible
4) Obvious spam or fake Twitter accounts will be treated as ineligible
5) Anyone found to use multiple accounts to enter will be ineligible
6) Make sure @flickpad is in your retweet
7) Make sure to follow @flickpad
8) Must be US resident to win iPad

Update (8/24/2010) - The contest officially ended on 8/20/2010 but we will still be giving away an iPad when we hit 815 Twitter followers.  Make sure to follow the rules.  One tweet and a follow is all it takes to enter.

I was just doing some research on this and figured I would post it here for other devs that might be looking for similar answers (and because Stack Overflow limits new members to one link per reply). The best resources I have found are:

http://www.capturetheconversation.com/technology/iphone-facebook-oauth2-graph-api
http://www.capturetheconversation.com/technology/iphone-facebook-oauth-2-0-and-the-graph-api-a-tutorial-part-2
http://benbiddington.wordpress.com/2010/04/23/facebook-graph-api-getting-access-tokens/
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/desktop
http://matrixpointer.com/karl/posts/mpoauth-on-the-iphone-mpoauthmobile 

Interesting that Facebook advocates embedding a browser when best practices seem to dictate OAuth authentication happen in an external browser for security purposes.

Twitter seems to be moving a little faster, with it’s support of xAuth (Assuming you are building a desktop or mobile app).

http://www.reynoldsftw.com/2010/03/using-xauth-an-alternate-oauth-from-twitter/

Misc Resources: 
http://github.com/bengottlieb/Twitter-OAuth-iPhone 
http://github.com/aral/XAuthTwitterEngine 
http://github.com/yourhead/xAuth_ObjC_Test_App 
http://github.com/lukhnos/objectiveflickr
http://immike.net/blog/2008/09/08/oauth-on-the-iphone/ http://fireeagle.yahoo.net/developer/documentation/oauth_best_practice

Facebook is awesome, and I love browsing photos from all my friends, but I must say that I find it cumbersome.  I often miss new photos that have been posted because I don’t happen to check Facebook soon enough after photos were posted and they got lost in the news feed.  Also, clicking through albums often leaves me with a browser history that makes using the back button in the browser pretty much useless.

When the iPad was first announced, I saw a huge opportunity to improve the way people view Facebook photos.  The iPad by it’s very nature, encourages interaction and enjoyment of photos.  The iPad received a lot of negative press early on because of what it was not, a laptop replacement.  To me, the iPad has always been meant to primarily sit on a coffee table and take the place of magazines, newpapers, tv guides, remote controls, internet browsers, handheld games, game consoles, and more.  

It is with that use in mind that we designed Flickpad.  While having your morning coffee or vegging out after work, you can quickly catch up with all the photos your friends have been posting on Facebook.  It really is addictive and fun to use.

Check out Flickpad in the app store.

I am one of those people that tote around a 17” MacBook Pro and love it.  The MBP has been my primary development machine for going on four years now and I continue to think it is the best setup for the average nomadic Mac developer.  Even with the 17” MBP though, extra screen real estate is always nice to have, and historically I have used an external secondary monitor via the DVI out of the MBP.  This is a great setup that mainly developers end up using. Recently though, I have taken it one step further and I must say, I am totally loving the new setup.

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While working on our latest app for the iPad, Flickpad, I have been knee deep in Facebook FQL.  FQL provides a powerful, albeit resource limited, way to access Facebook data.  FQL is loosely inspired by SQL, pretty much just implementing the most basic syntax features.  There are no joins allowed, tables must be queried on at least one of there indexed fields, IN is supported but NOT IN is not.  Facebook provides one nugget though, fql.multiquery.  Mutliquery allows you to batch up multiple queries and send them in one request.  It also allows queries to reference the results of other queries in the batch.  Documentation on multiquery is pretty limited so I figure I would put up a sample from Flickpad.   This particular multiquery is pulling all albums, comments, likes, and users for a given set of photos (users is pulling users based on the comments query).

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Our iPhone application The Now is a tool to help people live more mindfully.  The Now accomplishes this using a technique called continuous mindfulness training.  The process works by using periodic cues, in this case, free iPhone push notifications with an audible chime and relevant message, to remind you to be fully focused on the present.  When we started creating The Now we researched what was involved in adding push notification support to the app.  The standard method involves setting up your own complex push notification server, which then communicates with Apple’s push servers.  This seemed like overkill for the limited scope of our push notification usage, so we started exploring third party push notification services.  We discovered and settled on using Urban Airship’s push notification service.  

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There is no doubt that the AppStore has revolutionized the distribution and sale of mobile applications, but for all its success, it could use some major improvement in a couple areas.

One of the most publicized issues is the app approval process and the seemingly random nature with which guidelines are enforced.  To be fair, this one is more of an Apple failing than the AppStore in particular.

The main issue with the AppStore itself is not the apps that are getting rejected but the ones that are being let in.  There appears to be no minimum standard in terms of quality for app approval.  Apple likes to boast about the number of apps in the AppStore but sadly a huge percent of them are complete junk.  This has resulted in the AppStore’s single biggest problem, separating the wheat from the chaff.  A large percent of the apps have little to no sales, yet they continue to clog the store.  One particular category that annoys me is the apps that just provide a slideshow of photos, often with blatant theft of copyrighted images.  Endless variations of the same app but with different photos litter the store.

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I would have thought that one of the hardest parts of starting a software product company would be coming up with the killer idea that is going to make you and all your partners rich.  It turns out that it is hard, but not in the way that I thought.  Coming up with the killer ideas has actually been the easy part.  We have about a half dozen ideas right now, that I believe, if designed and developed to their full potential could be hugely successful.   Evaluating and picking which single killer idea gives you the best chance for success on the other hand is crazy hard.  As an indie developer with no funding, you only have time to pursue so many ideas before you’ve got to face reality.

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