Aloha Cocoa

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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