Tag Archives: apps

Facebook breaking change to launch October 1

Facebook’s recent changes have been all over the news and the Internet, and while most Facebook users won’t care about the change coming on October 1, it does effect those of us who develop Facebook Apps.

On Saturday Facebook is upgrading their SDK for PHP and JavaScript to use OAuth 2.0, a new and more secure version of the OAuth platform. This is also what’s called a “breaking” change. That means all existing Facebook applications using the previous 2.1 PHP SDK and JavaScript need to be upgraded to the PHP 3.1.1 SDK or your Facebook App will no longer work after October 1.

One of the big effects of this is upgrade is the change to how apps access Facebook user information, which means that all Canvas and Page tab apps must convert to process signed_request (fb_sig will be removed).

Two other things to note:

• Apps that have been built using the Facebook PHP SDK 3.1.1 do not need to be changed.
• Apps that are using the old JavaScript library for authentication need to modify their code.

If you’re need to get working on these changes before anything breaks you can follow the steps from Facebook to make the upgrade.

The Internet wishlist

The Internet Wishlist is a tumblr blog that collects “ideas for apps and websites people are wishing for.” Some are whimsical: “I wish there was an app that projected our imagination out into the open” and some make you wonder it hasn’t been done yet: “”I wish there was a website that would track everything being shipped to me at one time.” If you’re the entrepreneurial type you can get cracking on the next big thing, or if you’re the wistful type you can put idea out there and hope someone builds it for you.

App beats out nom and junk for word of the year

Photo from the Linguistic Society of America’s Flickr stream

The word ‘App’ was chosen as the word of the year by the American Dialect Society. You can see by the slide here it beat out both ‘nom’ and ‘junk.’ But what’s interesting here is that not only is there an American Dialect Society, but that they actually get together and vote by a show of hands on the words. Don’t believe me, take a gander at the photos from the event.

According to the society’s press release, “the vote is the longest-running such vote anywhere, the only one not tied to commercial interests, and the word-of-the-year event up to which all others lead. It is fully informed by the members’ expertise in the study of words, but it is far from a solemn occasion. Members in the 121-year-old organization include linguists, lexicographers, etymologists, grammarians, historians, researchers, writers, authors, editors, professors, university students, and independent scholars. In conducting the vote, they act in fun and do not pretend to be officially inducting words into the English language. Instead they are highlighting that language change is normal, ongoing, and entertaining.”

That paragraph right there is so delightfully nerdy I don’t even know what to say. You should read the entire press release (warning, pdf) to see how much the web and web culture plays in the words of the year.

Wired: The Web is dead.

Here’s your homework for tonight, reading Wired’s exhaustive package on how apps are killing the web and who’s to blame (us or them, though I haven’t quite figured out who us and them are. I blame that hard to read white on red text).

“Over the past few years, one of the most important shifts in the digital world has been the move from the wide-open Web to semiclosed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display. It’s driven primarily by the rise of the iPhone model of mobile computing, and it’s a world Google can’t crawl, one where HTML doesn’t rule. And it’s the world that consumers are increasingly choosing, not because they’re rejecting the idea of the Web but because these dedicated platforms often just work better or fit better into their lives (the screen comes to them, they don’t have to go to the screen).”

And for extra credit you can read Boing Boing’s refutation of Wired’s infographic.

That will be all.