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A New Take on the Developer App

June 29, 2011ByAlan McConnell

Today we’re announcing major updates to the Developer App to help you easily access, edit and manage your apps on the Developer Site. This is the first major update to the app since 2009, and we’ve taken feedback from developers of all sizes to optimize performance and functionality. Whether you are managing hundreds of apps or just getting started building your first app on Facebook, we want your experience to be simple, efficient, and fast.

Simple

The Developer App dashboard has been redesigned to give you quick access to your apps. For example, you can now access your most recently viewed apps from the left-hand menu, see all apps in a convenient summary view, or search for your apps easily from the dashboard.

We have also made it easy for you to see important app information at a glance. On the dashboard, you’ll see a summary of frequently needed app info including the app ID, app secret, and URLs. You can also quickly grant a user access token for your app, view Roles and see Insights.

We have reorganized the sections within the Developer App to reduce redundant fields. Tooltips and field descriptions have also been added to help you better understand the requested information.

Efficient

The new Developer App includes features designed for efficiency and ease of use. If you’re new to Facebook Platform, you can easily access the Getting Started Guides for Apps on Facebook, Websites, or Mobile Apps from the appropriate section in the Developer App.

Managing roles for your app is more straightforward. Add administrators, developers, testers, and insights users from the Roles interface by clicking the “Add” link. Use the auto-completion functionality to add Facebook friends or even non-Facebook friends via email or Facebook UID.

In addition, you can type in an app name in the search box and the auto-completion functionality will help you get to the app you’re looking for in just a few keystrokes.

Fast

We built the new Developer App to be cleaner and faster, with quicker load time, so you can edit and save changes to apps at an improved speed. The app now runs on the same high-performance architecture that powers Facebook and has a streamlined workflow, eliminating inefficient operations and data fetches.

This is just the beginning.

We started rolling out availability of the new Developer App to a limited set of developers today and plan to make it available to all developers over the next few weeks. We look forward to your feedback in the comments below and will continue to iterate and implement other features to make the Developer App more elegant and robust.


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