Facebook today announced the launch of a significant update to its software development kit (SDK) for iOS developers, making it easier to include Facebook integration within apps. The release also sets the stage for direct Facebook integration in iOS 6.
After iOS 6 launches to users, the SDK will automatically use the native Facebook Login in iOS 6 when available. Just enable Login with Facebook and the SDK will ensure your apps work seamlessly on all iOS versions 4.0 and later. The SDK will continue to support the iOS 6 integration in beta until Apple’s user launch later this fall.
Other improvements in the new SDK include:
- Better user session management: A new method for managing user tokens with both default and override behaviors.
- Ready-to-Use Native UI Views: New pre-built user interface components to handle user profile pictures, Facebook Places locations and check-ins, and friend selections.
- Modern Objective-C language features support: Support for features such as Automatic Reference Counting, blocks, and other tools for interfacing between the SDK and iOS.
- Improved Facebook APIs support: Batching of SDK requests for improved performance and other tools for working with Open Graph data.
Alongside the new SDK, Facebook has also launched a iOS Dev Center offering SDK resources including tutorials, reference documents, and concept ideas for building apps.
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Instead, the easiest way to add a like button is to use a UIWebView and have it load a local HTML file with a like button in it. It doesn't work particularly well, though, because then the user needs to log in to hit the button.