Platform Updates: Operation Developer Love

This week, we announced September 22, 2011 as the date for f8, our annual developer conference in San Francisco. See the blog post and the f8 website for more details.

Continuing our efforts to improve our engagement with developers, we announced a partnership with programming Q&A site Stack Overflow to launch facebook.stackoverflow.com, which will become the place to have your Facebook Platform questions answered.

As part of our effort to simplify who can see photos, tags, and other content on Facebook, we’ve simplified the Graph API permissions for photos and videos. We’ve deprecated the sometime confusing user_photo_video_tags permission and folded that functionality into user_photos and user_videos. Tuesday’s blog post has all the details.

Real-time Ticker and Fluid Canvas Now on for All Users

A few weeks ago, we announced a real-time ticker and a redesigned canvas for making apps more engaging and social. We have finished rolling out this functionality, and it is now available to everyone (we are still ironing out some issues with IE7 and will be adding support shortly).

Developer App Updates

We recently updated our Developer App to a more streamlined design (now available to all developers). We wanted to clear up a few questions that we’ve received from you:

• Canvas Page URL: The Canvas Page URL field is now auto-generated from the App Namespace. App Namespace is the short app name appended to apps.facebook.com (e.g., https://apps.facebook.com/YOUR_APP_NAMESPACE) to create the Canvas Page URL.
• Bookmark URL: This optional field was originally created to help developers track user referrals from app bookmarks. We now pass a ref parameter to let you know that the user is coming from a bookmark (i.e., ref=bookmarks). As a result, we removed Bookmark URL. While many developers left this field blank (defaulting to the Canvas URL), it recently came to our attention that some developers were using this field to redirect to Pages with the Page Tab app installed.
  We will be restoring the Bookmark URL to the Advanced tab under Canvas Settings for 90 days. This gives you time to edit the field before it will be removed from the Developer App. To give you the most flexibility, we recommend that you delete the Bookmark URL field and instead detect the ref=bookmarks parameter when the user visits your app and take the appropriate action (either redirect to your Page Tab app on a Page or show the user something different).
• App Description: We fixed a bug and have restored this on the Advanced tab in the Authentication section.

Changes to the iOS SDK

We’ve updated the iOS SDK and refactored some code to make it consistent with our internal methods. This is not a breaking change and, if you’re using a previous version of the SDK, you need not take any action. If you decide to upgrade to the latest release, please note that the following authentication method signatures have changed on the Facebook object:

- (id)initWithAppId:(NSString *)app_id
    andDelegate:(id<FBSessionDelegate>)delegate;

- (void)authorize:(NSArray *)permissions;

- (void)authorize:(NSArray *)permissions
     localAppId:(NSString *)localAppId;

The main change is that the specification of the delegate has moved from the authorize: methods to initWithAppId. As a result, please note that if you were changing the delegate with each call to authorize: you will now need to manually set the delegate, for example:

   facebook.sessionDelegate = self;

Please see the authentication section of the iOS SDK documentation for further details.

Docs

We updated the FQL documentation for the following tables:

• profile
• stream_filter
• video
• video_tag

We have also updated the JS SDK documentation for the FB.init method.

82 docs are under review.

Is there piece of documentation that you think particularly needs attention? Tell us by voting here.

Bugs

Bugzilla activity for the past 7 days:

• 126 new bugs were reported
• 17 bugs were reproducible and accepted (after duplicates removed)
• 8 bugs were fixed (none of which were reported this week)
• As of today, there are 1,252 open bugs in Bugzilla (up 26 from last week)

Facebook Stack Overflow Activity

Activity on facebook.stackoverflow.com this week:

• 409 questions asked
• 310 received a reply
• 76% answer rate