1 Prediction Down, 7 to Go – Facebook Launches Connect for the iPhone

Beginning of February I announced my 8 late predictions that I thought would happen in 2009. One of those, which I actually mentioned originally last year, was that Facebook would launch a developer platform for the iPhone. Such a prediction was hinted at last year by Facebook, was supposed to launch end of last year, and it would appear that this morning it came true. As of this morning, Facebook announced they are releasing Facebook Connect for the iPhone, and announced several of the first apps using it.

The platform integrates with the iPhone XCode platform and provides libraries that make integration of Facebook into any iPhone app easy. (Here’s where I get geeky, so beware) Per the documentation, the basics are that developers simply include the libraries in this manner:

#import “FBConnect/FBConnect.h”

Following that, the basic component of the app is the session object. To create a session object, you just need to provide code similar to this:

session = [FBSession sessionForApplication:myApiKey secret:myApiSecret delegate:self];

Following that, you’ll want a basic login button you can provide to users that authenticates the user and connects with the session object. To display the login button, use code like this:

FBLoginButton* button = [[[FBLoginButton alloc] init] autorelease];
[self.view addSubview:button];

Once the user is logged in, the session object should have the session key from Facebook, and you can make normal Facebook API calls from there. From there, you can get the session key and the session secret and send them back to your servers for processing, or make simple calls back to Facebook directly from the iPhone app using the provided libraries. Facebook provides this sample code as an example on how to do it from the iPhone:

– (void)getUserName {
NSString* fql = @”select name from user where uid == 1234″;
NSDictionary* params = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithObject:fql forKey:@”query”];
[[FBRequest requestWithDelegate:self] call:@”facebook.fql.query” params:params];
}

– (void)request:(FBRequest*)request didLoad:(id)result {
NSArray* users = result;
NSDictionary* user = [users objectAtIndex:0];
NSString* name = [user objectForKey:@”name”];
NSLog(@”Query returned %@”, name);
}

It would appear that 2009 is right on track, and I can’t wait to see what more Facebook has in store for us with the recent launch of their new design, new focuses, and more. This alone may be enough to get me even further into iPhone app development as the iPhone finally has the potential to become much more “Social”.