June 3, 2009

There's Code For That - New Social Library for Mac / iPhone Apps

Apple's WWDC is around the corner. If you follow the space, you know all about the upcoming iPhone 3.0 software (and all the new bells and whistles that are bound to come with it). Well, we'd like to pre-announce one more feature available for iPhone (and Mac OS X) developers.

Today we are rolling out a new Cocoa library that makes social interactions on the iPhone and Mac platforms easier. Want your iPhone game to send an update to your user's Yahoo! friends? There's an app for that. There's now code for that. In addition to fetching social information about your users (such as a user's profile and friends lists), you can create vitality around your app by streaming updates about your user's activities within the app. Everything from new high scores (did I mention my new Flight Control high score?) to location updates with FireEagle can now be shared to others (along with containing a link back to your application). All through a familiar Objective-C interface.

The second great thing about this new library is access to the Yahoo! Query Language. YQL is like a headless Yahoo! Pipe... or like querying the entire internet as if it were a database. This is a huge advantage for network-intensive iPhone apps; you can let Yahoo! load, process, and return your data faster than ever (and with fewer lines of code).

But this isn't just about the iPhone. Our new code is 100% Cocoa, meaning it works on the phone and in your regular Mac apps.

Best of all, the entire project is hosted over on our new YDN GitHub account. If you're itching to get started, head over to the documentation page and go to GitHub and fork the project.

If you've got questions or you want to talk about what you're working on, we just rolled out a brand new forum for discussion of the Y!OS SDKs.

Cheers!

Zach Graves
YOS UED

Posted at June 3, 2009 2:49 PM | Permalink

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