Posted by lee on February 16th, 2008
As a developer, have you ever wanted to banish your fears of hard disk failure and stupid mistakes in one easy step? Did you ever consider that using a hosted version control system could do just that? It’s long been established that using a version control system is A Good Thing for software quality and developer productivity. Joel on Software goes as far as claiming it as the very first step on the path to writing good code.
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Posted by lee on February 11th, 2008
Once you have come up with a great idea for a Facebook application, seeing an idea all the way through its implementation can be a tricky business. Once you’ve figured out how the application is supposed to work, your design of the implementation - the strategy of how you will code up your app - is crucial to the success of your initial version.
When targeting the Facebook platform, it’s essential we consider the following seven items before we even begin to start coding:
- Access control integration
- Life cycle callbacks
- Friend tracking
- Notification map
- Invite/request positioning
- Advert usage/placement
- Your main logic!
To guarantee your app’s successful development, read on for tips and tricks about all of the above.
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Posted by lee on February 4th, 2008
The Facebook platform can be a very restrictive mistress at times.
The documentation for sending notifications states:
“The notification parameter is a very stripped-down set of FBML which allows only tags that result in just text and links.”
But they’re lying - it’s even more restrictive than that. At the time of writing, enclosing any text in <strong> tags will cause it to disappear from the notification! It’s unclear why developers are restricted from emaphisizing the important text in a notification. I mistakenly assumed basic stylings would be possible.
