[APP-DEV] XDAFacebook Beta 4.8 (8-24-11) Groups!

XDAFacebook has a new home! Please update your links

Introduction: XDAFacebook is a Facebook Client application for Windows Mobile 6.5 written on the .net Compact Framework 3.5 platform.

News:

• This project is currently NOT in development. I (joe_coolish) have stopped work on the application indefinately and I've moved on to the Windows Phone platform. If you would like to take over the project, contact me for details.
• Due to school, homelife, and the search for my first "Big Boy" Job, development has slowed a little. Your support is crucial for motivating future development!

Google Code page: http://code.google.com/p/xda-winmo-facebook/

Updates

Follow updates on Twitter! Use the #xdafb hashtag to spread the word!
Here is an article on what kinds of feedback we're looking for when helping test the public beta: http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?p=9227274


[UPDATED 11/14/11]

BETA 4.8.9

• Added old notifications
• view likes
• like comments on posts
• view comments for photos
• fixed photo rendering
• fixed login
• LOTS of bug fixes!

[UPDATED 10/6/11]

Well, I just became a father to a wonderful baby girl! I hope you like the UI update Thanks to hungelt8 for all your efforts to support me and the project! Cudos to you


BETA 4.8.6

• New skinning system. Utilizes ZIPs to package the images and deploy them to your device
• Improved graphics rendering
• Better memory management. Should help out with the OOMEs
• CHAT login should work. You should be able to see your online friends. Nothing else has been implemented at the moment, but it will shortly!
• Fixed the Friends Tagged in Checkins
• LOTS of bug fixes!

[UPDATED 8/24/11]

It's been a long time, but we're still here!


BETA 4.8

• Groups! Yes, groups are now visible
• Improved graphics rendering
• Comments now include history. By clicking on Add Comment, a history is shown so you can remember what you're posting about!
• LOTS of bug fixes!

[UPDATED 5/4/11]

Happy Star Wars Day! "May the 4th be with you!"

BETA 4.7

• Skinning!
• Improved graphics rendering
• GZip and Deflated HTML downloading
• Better threading and thread handling
• Added the latest 25-50 status updates to friends list
• Image viewer has been completely overhauled and re-done
  • Including Swiping back and forth to change the current picture!
  • You can also use the side buttons to do this too!
• More accurate Post Likes and Comments count
• LOTS of bug fixes!

BETA 4.6.1

• Fixed GPS issues for non Eng-US phones
• Fixed Friends not being selected for Home Screen
• A couple of new bug fixes
• Better first-run experience

BETA 4.6!

• Icon based Homescreen: Now you can customize your homescreen however you would like!
• New Graphics rendering/memory management: The code for displaying and managing images has been 100% re-written. Memory is now much better managed as well.
• Pull down to refresh: Update your feeds by pulling down on the panel and releasing after the pull threshold
• Bug fixes: Lots of bugs have been found and fixed

BETA 4.5!

• Places/Checkins! Yep, the only Facebook client for Windows Mobile to support Checkins and places! Just know that GPS data is sent to Facebook when you use the Checkin portion of the client. Some devices may experience lag!
  • IMPORTANT! In order to use the new Places features, you must Logout and then log back into XDAFacebook. This will cause you to authorize XDAFB to use the Place APIs. I recommend using the External Browser login method to do this.
• Landscape Support! I've tried to implement as much of the app with landscape compatibility. There still are some things that aren't 100% (eg, dropdowns) but they are in the works! If you find something that doesn't look right in landscape, feel free to bring it up!
• Bug Fixes: A couple of key bugs were fixed. One of which is the old graphics cropping up every once in a while.
• I also added a First Time message that will display key features with each release upon first install.
• Finally I added a donate button in the About menu. Feel free to test it all you'd like!

A little bit about the Checkin protocol. The UX (User Experience) for using the new Checkin features is as follows:

1. Click on places
2. Click on "Checkin" tab
3. Wait for GPS coordinates to be received (depending on the device, this can take some time)
4. Select nearby "Place" to Checkin to.
5. (Optional) Add a message
6. (Optional) Tag friends
   • This can be a little confusing.
   • To tag, select the "Tag" Item. This will slide the screen left
   • Click on the "Add Friends" item. This will slide the screen left
   • Select the friends you want to tag. their background will turn lavander
   • When you have selected the friends you want to tag, either swipe right or click the arrow in the top left corner
   • Verify that the correct friends have been selected and swipe right or click the arrow in the top left corner
7. Click the "Checkin" item.

Some people may be wondering where the "Deals" section is. This feature has not been added to the Graph and is only available to 1st party Client applications. Once Deals are available to the Graph, it will be added!

BETA 4.4.1!

• Bug fixes

BETA 4.4!

• New Post items! Posts now support viewing links and all the information that is available via Facebook Graph
• Fixed Photo albums! Now you can view all of the photos in the photo albums. Not just the first 25 pictures!
• Inbox! Unfortunately, Facebook does not allow 3rd party apps to compose messages. This was enabled for a short period of time, but was heavily abused and thus, removed. But you can veiw them!
• Post Deletion! This one was actually one of the biggest let-downs. With Post deletion, you can only delete posts that YOU made with XDAFacebook. Also, there is no way to know if you made the post with XDAFacebook (that I've descovered atleast) so the only way to know is try and if it fails, too bad!
  • To delete a post, simply swipe from right to left over a post that you made. The post will slide over, revealing a delete button.
  • Upon clicking, if the post is yours AND was done by XDAFacebook, it will successfully be deleted. If the post was not made by XDAFacebook, it will error out.
  • If the post does not slide, make sure that you are swiping from Right to Left, and that the post was made by the logged int XDAFacebook user. Also note that you have a Y-axis tollerance of 1/8 your screen size, so make sure that you aren't moving your finger up or down too much
• Requests are now MUCH faster!
• Events! Now you can view your invited events and your events that you have responded to. This is still in early stages and more will be added to it.
• Add and view Notes! The notes section has been created
• Speed improvements! Several optimizations were required to handle the new items, so things should be more efficient. However, there is always room for improvement!
• Small Bug fixes:
  • Fixed a small bug with Textbox Items not handling OnFocus events
  • Also! Added a "Done" and "Cancel" buttons to the Textbox Items. Now you can click the softkey and have the dialog disapear OR cancel the changes
  • Various other fixes that I can't think of

BETA 4.1.1

• Photo Albums! Pictures can now be viewed in XDAFacebook.
  • Big pictures will open up in the default browser for the time being. Once I make a good photo viewer, I'll replace that.
  • Also, the settings menu has a whole section dedicated to photos. Feel free to play with the settings, but numerical values == 0 or <0 will cause the app to crash! There is no safty net for this!
  • There is a number for concurrent image downloads. This number should be between 6-10. Any more can cause slow down, and less and the effect seems non-existant. I've gone as high as 25 and felt pretty good about it. But I haven't dared push it to the limit!
  • New albums had a few bugs so I held back on this release. It will be coming soon!
• Older Posts! Feel free to browse the older posts I've successfully gone about a days worth of posts back w/o any lag.
• Searchable Friends List! I added a search box at the top of the friends search list
• Memory Management! Special Thanks goes out to Corwin9S. He helped me look at the memory usage. I reduced the CPU cycles by ~30%. It still takes up about 3-6 mbs of RAM. This is caused by Form Allocations, DLL imports, etc. Most of the space is just allocated space that I can't get rid of. I will try to find more ways to make the RAM usage go down, but from what I've been told by some people at MSFT, this numer isn't uncommon or bad. CPU cycles are what count and that's what I'm trying to optimize
• GUI fixes! I finished the drop-downs, so they look a little more professional. I also added the numerical counters. There are still more that can be done on them, so I will continue improving their apperance and performance.
• Rollup of bug fixes
• And finally SPEED!! This version should be the fastest yet. Rendering times are super quick and load times seem to be back to where they belong.

Instructions for Localization:

Please create a blank language file (instructions are above) and edit ONLY the text in between the quote marks "". The quotes need to remain!
Verify that your text doesn't fly off the screen. Anywhere that the text is too long for the graphic, try shortening the word or pick a different one (if that's possible) if not, let me know (via picture) and I'll make the necessary changes.
Once you have a translated file, save it as <Language>.txt and upload it to your device. Place it in the same directory where you got the Blank.txt.

Please share your translations!

ALSO! Since the app will be transforming and new features will be being added, the translation process will be ongoing.
If you click "Create Blank Language File" and you already had an alternate translation loaded and working, the Blank.txt will only have the new strings in english, so you will only need to translate the changes.

Unfortunately, after a couple of hours searching the web and looking at platform SDKs, I have learned that poking is not supported by the Graph or REST APIs (what I use to interact with facebook). I've been looking, and I might be able to hack something that might work, or I could have the option to support Pokes via SMS. I need your feedback. Which option (or both) sounds the best? Does anyone even Poke anymore?!

Wall posting is very basic at the moment. I will be making an advanced text editor that has more options for posting links, privacy settings, etc.

I also changed the road map a little. Let me know if that works for everyone!

Hope everyone likes the new updates!
ENJOY!

BigWopHH said:

I'll beleive there's an update coming when I see it. The app went from being updated every few days, to nothing for almost two months.

Click to expand...

Click to collapse

Hi BigWopHH

Just so you know, there has been A LOT of updates. And while I haven't made an official release in a while, I have been working on it.

The current problem is that the graphics are REALLY slow. I've been working on trying to optimize graphic rendering and threading mainly. I've even gone to the point of creating and reading PNGs in app w/o the use of the Imaging APIs.

What that means is that I actually wrote a PNG decoder for Windows Mobile and worked with the images in memory. Unfortunately, I hit the memory limit too frequently doing this, so I had to scrap the whole thing

As for threading, I was manually doing all of the threading with logic, but it was causing the ThreadTimerExceptions when I tried to close down the the threads manually. This caused me to gut the whole threading system and implement another solution. This also caused a lot of re-writing.

So, there has been a lot of work done on the App.

What I want to do before I release another version is get the stutters out of the image drawing. I don't think this is going to happen thou, so I will get it to working conditions and then just have to be happy with that.


On the personal side, I am a web developer by profession. Most of my experience is with handling data (manipulation, processing, mining, etc) I've never been trained on graphics and I have little experience with Mobile development.

If you have any skills with Programming, I would love to have you on the team to help me get the application up. With your help I am sure that I can get releases out MUCH more frequently!

So, what do you say? You want to help with development? My email is joe.coolish@gmail.com, I look forward to your help

I'm Back!

Hi everyone! I'm back

I have read every reply while I was gone and even snuck a few coding sessions to fix some minor bugs that have been reported. I thank everyone for their support and praise It really helps!

On that note, I noticed that over the past week, this thread has gone from 5 stars to 4 stars? If there is anything I can do to make those who voted less than 5 stars change their vote, please PM me and I will try and resolve any issues.

So, I had quite the adventure over the holiday. I've been visiting the in-laws in the Mid-West for the past week, so I haven't had access to real internet (I was only able to check xda via my HD2 and even my cell signal was hit or miss). I wanted to wait till I was on a real computer to reply to everyone and talk about the next update. So here I am!

First, the adventure (skip to the bolded text for the project update): I was suppose to fly in yesterday afternoon, but when my plane was about 30 miles away from my airport, the weather caused the plane to be diverted 200 miles away the nearest big city. At that, my wife decided she wanted to sleep so I busted out the lappy to do some work on the project (I swear it's an unhealthy addiction!) but I only had 20% battery left (we'd been watching TV on it the first part of the trip) so about an hour later I was left lappy-less

3 hours later we were given the all-clear to return my home town airport... We landed in SLC and my parents picked us up and took us home. We ate dinner (this was actually the first meal I had eaten all day and it was 21:30) and then left into a full on blizzard. We FINALLY got home and started to unpack and I realized that I left my lappy along with all the new code at my parent's house. So, frustrated with the day, I decided to play a little Call of Duty on my xbox. Well, 3 or 4 games later, I was having an amazing game and... my xbox RROD'd.... So, I've spent all day today modding and unRRODing it (warranty was void many years ago).

moral of the story: I didn't get hardly anything done since before Christmas.

ANYWAYS! Project updates:
The one thing I did get done was mapped out a solution for the Home screen. I'm going to make a CHT-esque 3x3 grid that you can assign specific short-cuts. It will also allow me to not have squished tiles in landscape!

The CHT-esque grid will be pageable as well. Meaning there will be multiple 3x3 panels (like the iPhone Facebook Client). I'm going to make the farthest left panel be a global Facebook search and the farthest right panel be a "Pictures" panel that can be sorted either by random photos of a specific user/all friend or most recent uploaded (or anything else that people might want)

I also figured out how I want to implement updates!!!!
I played with my Dad's iPhone while I was at his house and it recently got a Facebook Client update that was pretty cool. The way they do updates is scroll to the top of an updateable panel (ie, Feeds) and then pull the panel down to revile a hidden "magic update item". If you pull the panel down enough to revile the whole update item and then released, all the updated posts to that panel are added!

It may seem complicated, but trust me, it's very intuitive.


Well, sorry for such a long post and such a long absence! I hope everyone had a great holiday!

Ok, I just got my new HD2, my old one had some touch screen problems so it's been out of commission for the past week or so.

Anyways, I'm working on a whole new Async HTTP connection thingy. It should make data transmition much better!

I've also started work on the chat interface. I'm going to probably be releasing a new version with an "Echo Chat" that will kind of demo what things are going to look like.

I'm also going to incorporate the new UI that was posted. I think it looks clean and professional. So, it should be a pretty good update!