Facebook Phone

We love Tim Sweeney.

Music to program to.

http://www.beatsinspace.net/

So i want to have 2 lists.
1 for friends with the Phone application that you can talk to.
The second to invite your other friends to use the program.
Having it all in a consistent UI is the aim.

My first task is to display a list of all friends in a Flex 4 List.
Done!

Basically I’m calling getFriends() and then getUserInfo(friendsUids);
Then I’m creating a separate ArrayCollection to use as the dataProvider for my list.
My list uses a custom ItemRenderer which displays first_name, last_name.

Now i just need to figure out how to handle click events from the itemRenderer and invite them!

Flex 4 List Example http://blog.smartlogicsolutions.com/2008/08/16/recreating-elys-flex-4-list-component-series/
Flex Examples http://blog.flexexamples.com/

For starters, kudos to Daniel Dura. The examples were easy to get running in Flex 4.

Now the criticisms.
1. XML instead of AMF? please, i thought Adobe might be offering something special here. Its basically wrapper objects to consume the current facebook api webservices.
2. Logging in is nasty. login() then validatelogin()? alot of overhead wasted in 2 calls here.
3. Architecture sucks. I dont like all the casting of the event.data property. It would have been nicer if there was a proper delegate layer provider.

Its going to be a little difficult especially with the lack of useful documentation but atleast they have given us something to start with.
It will be interesting to see how this library grows as the facebook api grows.

Facebook-actionscript-api http://code.google.com/p/facebook-actionscript-api/
Faceook API Documentation http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Main_Page

I’m not totally new to it but here’s my summary of how this project has begun.

Download Flex 4 and setting up a new project was quite easy.
The difficulty starts with the editor. No code assist makes things more difficult than Flex 3. Especially considering that I’m not familiar with the new architecture. I’m sure a Flex Builder 4 pre-release will make this a lot easier.

The spark skin is rather ugly (as was halo) but even more so. I don’t expect any of this styling to remain in the final deploy.

I can’t seem to find any of the documentation for the current spark components so I mainly using the whitepapers posted on opensource.adobe/gumbo and examples posted on FlexExamples.
Gumbo Specs http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Gumbo

Well, basically its skype for facebook.

I’m not sure if it has been built already but i will give it a crack.
I’ll be using the new peer to peer connectivity in Flash player 10 to achieve this.

Also since my main experience is in Flex development I will use Flex 4 (Gumbo) to create it.

Designs will be primarily based on the iPhone phone design.

I also plan to use the new adobe-facebook as3 api library to assist with facebook api calls.
Flex 4 Gumbo http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Gumbo
Flash 10 Peer to Peer http://justin.everett-church.com/index.php/2008/05/23/astrop2p/
facebook-actionscript-api http://code.google.com/p/facebook-actionscript-api/

Welcome,

This is a blog that documents my progress with developing a phone application for facebook.

It will be a series of frequent short blog posts as opposed to long detailed posts.