At the beginning of last month, you may remember we told you that Facebook had released a “Beta” version of its third SDK designed for iOS. Today, we’re pleased to report that the SDK is now out of ‘Beta’ and is now available for download.
According to the official announcement, developers can now expect to find “ready-to-use native UI controls, better session management, improved support for calling Facebook” in the Software Development Kit, as well as “APIs and support for modern Objective-C language features,” and more!
Head below for the key elements new in Facebook’s SDK for iOS.
1. Better user session management: In the past, managing auths, user sessions and tokens was hard. We’ve spent a lot of time working to make these takes easier for you. This release introduces FBSession, which manages, stores and refreshes user tokens with default behaviors you can override. It uses the block metaphor to notify your app when a user’s token changes state.
2. Ready-to-Use Native UI Views: This SDK release includes a variety of pre-built user interface (UI) components for common functions. You can quickly drop them into your apps instead of building each one from scratch or using dialogs. This gives you a fast, native and consistent way to build common features.
- FBProfilePictureView lets you display a user’s profile picture.
- FBPlacePickerViewController allows users to query the Facebook Places database to find nearby options and check in.
- FBFriendPickerViewController, with single and multi-selection options, enables users to easily select friends. This supports filtering friends by device type and application authorization status.
3. Modern Objective-C language features support: With Automatic Reference Counting (ARC), you no longer have to spend as much time on memory management. Support for blocks means that it’s now more straightforward to handle sessions and calls to asynchronous Facebook APIs. This, along with inclusion of key language features like idiomatic API naming and KVO, allows you to transition seamlessly between the Facebook SDK and Apple’s iOS environment.
4. Improved Facebook APIs support: We have enabled batching for SDK requests to significantly improve latency for Facebook API calls, which translates to much faster access times for API requests. Support for strongly typed Objective-C types for graph actions and objects makes programming against the social graph more concise and easier. This combined with our action publishing API makes it easier to publish Open Graph actions to people’s timelines.
The final edition of the SDK is also set to bring with it features for iOS 6, too:
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.
Those looking to get started with Facebook’s SDK for iOS should check out the company’s handy ‘Get Started’ guide – (alongside the provided ‘Tutorial’) – which should get you well on your way to integrating Facebook into your own apps, successfully.
Download Facebook SDK 3.0 for iOS on Github!
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