friendsbook (a facebook client)

[sic_software]

We are a company names Sic! Software and implemented a facebook client for the palm pre, which is free for everyone.

Manual:
After starting the client first, it shows a splash screen with a connect button.

After clicking that button it will show you a web form where you have to enter your username/password combination.
After clicking "Connect" please comfirm the following "allow permissions" screen.
IMPORTANT: you have to scroll down to find the allow button

After showing a "sucess" screen the client will start.
If logged in once, no more login is required after restart. Note: if you login to you account via facebook.com you will get automatically get logged out in friendsbook.
To manually logout, choose the "logout" command in the app menue.
The main screen looks like that:

By default there are the 30 last entries shown. Pressing the more button will cause the next 30 entries to get loaded and so on..

Below the userstatus there is a textinput field. In this field you can type what you are doing. Just Press enter on the keyboard to submit this status.
The list above contains the the "news feed" ot the "wall" of the logged in person. You can tap any list entry and a popup will show the available actions here (like this, remove post, gotoUsersWall, create comment).

This client uses optimized programmcode which caches frienddetails like imageurl and first/lastname. So after loaded once your friendlist, a reload will be much faster and you dont have much network traffic during using this client.

you can see the notifications count in the page header, which will reload on every refresh click and every 150 seconds. If you tab this number and the number is >0, the notifications screen will get shown.
On the bottom left you can see the new switcher command which will allow you to switch between wall and newsfeed.

The icons are (from left to right)

• Show newsfeed switcheritem
• Show userwall switcheritem
• Show my friendlist
• More actions menue command
• Refresh this view

The actions menue command will show a submenue. There you can find:
- Shoot and Upload
- Select and Upload
- My Photos
- New Post

retabbing one of the switcher items will cause only to reload status and wall/newsfeed. Notifications are not reloaded then.

The next screen shows the notifications screen:


This screen shows your recent facebook notifications as you configured them at facebook.com. The highlights are clickable. Tabbing on of this items will redirect you as near as possible near to that event. This screen will update also automatically every 150 seconds.
Note: the 150 seconds update is a incremental update call, so if there is no new notification there will no new data be loaded over the air there.

you can mark a notification item as read in the following way:

In the notifications screen swipe a entry from the left/right to the right/left to make the delete button visible (this is a system default behaviour). Tabbing delete will to enqueue this item for mark as read. If you leave the notifications screen with the back gesture, all enqueue items will get marked as read (this will allow you to mark many many items as read with only 1 api call)

Generall:

The userinterface is keept simple and is 100% comform to the official Application Checklist from Palm (including transitions).
Check out the application and you will very soon find all the features included

The features are:

• Show notifcation cound and notification details
• Login through facebook connect
• Personal Status updates
• Display all friends
• Display your news feed
• Display your wall
• View status und details from a friend
• Display the wall from friends
• Create new Message on a wall
• Remove created message from a wall
• Create like on a wall entry
• Create comment on a wall
• Show all comments from a post
• Load more newsfeed and wall entries
• Intelligent caching to optimize application performance and data traffic
• Open videos and images from a users wall (mp4 videos not supported by palm yet)
• Open the homepage from a friend
• Display photo albums from a friend
• Display photos from a album in imageviewer with caption overlay
• Upload a photo by file selection
• Upload a photo by camera shoot
• Logout

Known Issues:

• Image Upload will work only with WebOs Version 1.2 and above
• Application sometimes hangs in the "sucess" screen at startup. Restart will help

Get facebook on palm connected now and enjoy !

Versioning:
palmbook_1.0.4

• no more "is" prefix at status updates
• Displaying date at comments
• Preview image to upload
• Edit caption for image to upload

palmbook_1.0.5

• fixed create comment bug

palmbook_1.0.7

• fixed connect bug

palmbook_1.1.0

• Added "Load All Comments" feature
• Date and Timeformats are now location based

friendsbook_1.1.2

• Renamed Palmbook to Friendsbook
• Added "Show More" in comments an userwall

friendsbook_1.1.3

• Fixed "hanging app on no friends wall" bug

friendsbook_1.1.4

• Back gesture works now in loginflow
• Fixed whitescreen after coming back from album view

friendsbook_2.0.0

• added show notifications count feature
• added show notifications details feature
• added mark notification as read feature
• added switch between wall and newsfeed feature
• massive code refactoring and improvement
• memory usage improvement

friendsbook_2.0.1

• show 'post from' -> 'post to' on newsfeed
• image links in wall/news entry are clickable now
• imageview can switch to landscape now
• imageview jumps automatically to the tabbed image

friendsbook_2.0.3

• Fixed Login bug - Stay login works now again

Download The Newest Version

SiC! Software GmbH - The Experts in Mobility Software

[joetemp75]

just tried it and it is pretty cool thanks sic

[duce152]

.thannx!!! This is great!! I've been waiting for a facebook app like this, thx great job!!

[tidusmccoy1515]

OMG. This is the perfect Facebook app. I have purchased Friends Flow and its a great app that lets me keep up to date with status' but your app lets me do everything thats important on facebook. It is amazing. I love your app. You should submit it to the app catalog. I have found almost no problems with it. However, one of the nice features of "Friends Flow" is the themes it allows, particularly the black theme. Maybe in a future update you can include something like that.

As for the resourcefulness of this application though, it is by far the best facebook app i've used (and I used to have an iPhone with facebook on it). Good job. Everyone should be using this app.

[sic_software]

Thanks for the great response!
The app is already commited to the (homebrew) catalog, it only needs to be unlocked. This will be done tomorroy i think.

[mamouton]

This is a good start. I have downloaded as well. I notice that you are limited on viewing previous posts. Also when I go to the main facebook site on my desktop the posts are the same. It appears to be pulling random posts. I also notice that if someone posts on a wall and they have the facebook user as a name your program shows null null. Hope this helps some on your journey to making your app.
To be able to customize the themes would be nice as well.

[sic_software]

The returned previous posts are limited by the facebook api. We have no possibility to affect that.
Thanks for the nullusername bugreport, we will consider that in the next update.

Originally Posted by mamouton

This is a good start. I have downloaded as well. I notice that you are limited on viewing previous posts. Also when I go to the main facebook site on my desktop the posts are the same. It appears to be pulling random posts. I also notice that if someone posts on a wall and they have the facebook user as a name your program shows null null. Hope this helps some on your journey to making your app.
To be able to customize the themes would be nice as well.

[DrSuSE]

Have to say... I really like your app. Clean, functional, etc... I do have one request. Could you please change the formatting on Wall-to-Wall stuff? As it is, you cannot really tell what it is. Instead of just the persons name (like the normal posts in the feed), it should be more like "Edgar Friendly > My Name" know what I mean?

Thanks in advance and thank you for sharing your work.

[mamouton]

No problem. On the previous post part I have used another facebook client and the previous posts go back several days. When I look at my main site via my desktop the posts you are showing seem to appear in the live feed. Hope this helps you some. I do like your little icons at the bottom though.

[DrSuSE]

How do you expand a post to show all comments?

[d.moss]

cool dude.. haven't tried it yet but i'm about to.. be back in a sec to let ya know what i feel about it

**edit** ok i'm back. its a nicely put together app. i won't critique it much since this is version one and i know more work is intended.. so good job. it really does do all that i need it to do. others have reported some issues and heres one that i noticed.. the date and time of a previous post was wrong.. it read 04.11.09 at 10:04pm when it was posted yesterday around 3. then i just posted my status at 7:53am central time this morning.. and it reads 05.11.09 at 1:53pm.. so there are some bugs that need to be worked out here.. but overall a good facebook app. at its current state i'd give it a 3 out of 5. with future fixes it has the potential to get all five stars.

**edit** as i look at it i see the format of the date is day/month/year.. originally i thought it was month/day/year.. so the date is ok.. the time is still an issue though.

[sic_software]

Originally Posted by DrSuSE

How do you expand a post to show all comments?

The facebook api only returns about the last 5 comments. Iam sorry but we have no possibility to display the older posts

Originally Posted by DrSuSE

Have to say... I really like your app. Clean, functional, etc... I do have one request. Could you please change the formatting on Wall-to-Wall stuff? As it is, you cannot really tell what it is. Instead of just the persons name (like the normal posts in the feed), it should be more like "Edgar Friendly > My Name" know what I mean?

Thanks in advance and thank you for sharing your work.

The logged in userwall is not displayed yet, so there will never be a entry like "aFriend> -> "ME" because that will occure on my personal userwall, which is not implemented yet. Will come in the next version.

Originally Posted by d.moss

cool dude.. haven't tried it yet but i'm about to.. be back in a sec to let ya know what i feel about it **edit** ok i'm back. its a nicely put together app. i won't critique it much since this is version one and i know more work is intended.. so good job. it really does do all that i need it to do. others have reported some issues and heres one that i noticed.. the date and time of a previous post was wrong.. it read 04.11.09 at 10:04pm when it was posted yesterday around 3. then i just posted my status at 7:53am central time this morning.. and it reads 05.11.09 at 1:53pm.. so there are some bugs that need to be worked out here.. but overall a good facebook app. at its current state i'd give it a 3 out of 5. with future fixes it has the potential to get all five stars. **edit** as i look at it i see the format of the date is day/month/year.. originally i thought it was month/day/year.. so the date is ok.. the time is still an issue though.

I think the time, which is displayed is GMT+0 . Could that be correct?

[SISGO]

I really want to try this app as soon as I can but I ll like to know how is working the notifications?.
can we receive fb notifications in background?

[scalderoni]

Nice App. went to your web site... looks like you do a lot of Mobility. Have you looked through the Precentral forums for other ideas? People really want to see a RDP app, VPN, SSH, and mabey even a NES emulator. Looks like you guys have the chops to go for it.

[dtg755]

can you install this from the pre or do you need to use something like quickinstall?

[sic_software]

Originally Posted by SISGO

I really want to try this app as soon as I can but I ll like to know how is working the notifications?.
can we receive fb notifications in background?

Background notifications are not implemented yet. Maybe it will come in a new version, but i thought the next big feature will be a chat.

Originally Posted by scalderoni

Nice App. went to your web site... looks like you do a lot of Mobility. Have you looked through the Precentral forums for other ideas? People really want to see a RDP app, VPN, SSH, and mabey even a NES emulator. Looks like you guys have the chops to go for it.

Well if you get us money we will implement everything for you The facebook app was implemented by us as a showcase for free. I think we wont implement more apps without a customer request.

Originally Posted by dtg755

can you install this from the pre or do you need to use something like quickinstall?

Currently the app is not officially unblocket by precentral, so you have to install it with the webosquickinstaller. Its the same procedure like installing the file coaster. Se here for details (in step 4 use the palmbook ipk).

[dtg755]

ok thanks...bummer because I'm at work and really wanted to try this out...maybe I can hijack a computer later today or something

[d.moss]

Originally Posted by dtg755

ok thanks...bummer because I'm at work and really wanted to try this out...maybe I can hijack a computer later today or something

if you have filecoaster on your phone you can orange+tap to copy the download link then paste it in the url downloader in filecoaster. works like a charm

[DrSuSE]

Originally Posted by sic_software

The facebook api only returns about the last 5 comments. Iam sorry but we have no possibility to display the older posts

Hi, thanks for the response. Are you sure, though... we have another Facebook app in the community that allows us to expand to show all comments. Even with the "last 5" limitation, though, Palmbook currently only the last 2 are shown.

Originally Posted by sic_software

The logged in userwall is not displayed yet, so there will never be a entry like "aFriend> -> "ME" because that will occure on my personal userwall, which is not implemented yet. Will come in the next version.

Great, I look forward to that in the next version of Palmbook, thanks!!

[bausti25]

Originally Posted by sic_software

Background notifications are not implemented yet. Maybe it will come in a new version, but i thought the next big feature will be a chat.

The chat would be really cool!