WebProNews

Tag: API

  • GDC 2013: Live Streaming API Coming To Games Courtesy Of YouTube

    Gamers love watching other people play games. It’s the only way to explain of popularity of Let’s Plays and live streams on YouTube, Twitch.tv and other sites. The only problem is that those who do live streams must have video capture equipment or software thus preventing a number of players from broadcasting their exploits.

    At GDC 2013, YouTube announced its intentions to change all that with a new API that allows game developers to integrate YouTube live streaming into their games. Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 proved the API’s popularity last year when the game allowed players to live-stream matches without the use of any third-party program.

    YouTube isn’t reserving live-streaming capabilities just for the hardcore crowd eiher. The API will be available to iOS and Android developers soon so mobile gamers can start sharing their screen with the world in real time.

    An interesting aspect of the new API is that YouTube may be helping content creators monetize their streams. There are tools in the API that would allow live-streamers to drop ads in the middle of their stream. It’s unknown if the live streamer would actually be able to make money off of their content though. Some publishers have rules in regards to monetization of in-game video so those rules may be left up to them.

    These APIs come at a time when YouTube faces stiff competition from other established, and more gamer centric, live streaming services like Twitch.tv. Twitch still requires extra software or hardware to stream, however, so YouTube’s APIs may just help bring more streamers and viewers to its side.

    [h/t: The Verge]

  • Learn How To Use The Realtime API In Google Drive Apps

    Earlier this week, Google introduced the world to the Realtime API for Google Drive. The new API allows developers to integrate the real time collaboration seen in Google Drive documents into apps. It opens up all new possibilities in apps like code builders and photo editors by allowing multiple users to interact with the app at once.

    If that sounds exciting to you, you’ll definitely want to check out Google’s latest Realtime API tutorial:

    During this session we’ll show how to build a complete JavaScript application that uses the Google Drive Realtime API to sync changes in a text document between two HTML elements.

  • Build Collaborative Apps With The Google Drive Realtime API

    One of the cool things about Google Drive is that it allows users to collaborate on documents in real time. Now Google is bringing that same functionality to apps built with the Google Drive SDK.

    Google announced today that developers can now build collaborative apps with the Google Drive SDK by using the Realtime API. Here’s a breakdown of what it does:

    Developing for the Drive Realtime API is almost as simple as working with local objects. The API provides collaborative versions of familiar data objects such as maps, lists, strings, and JSON values and automatically synchronizes and stores modifications to these objects. Your application reads from and writes to these objects like any other local object. Change event handlers can be added to collaborative objects so that your app can react to changes from other collaborators.

    If you want to learn more about the Realtime API, check out this video from Google on it:

    Some developers already have access to the API, and have built some rather impressive live collaboration apps using it. One such app is Neutron Drive, a Google Drive app that allows users to edit code. Now multiple users can edit the same code simultaneously thanks to the Realtime API:

    For more information on the Realtime API, check out Google’s documentation. There are other examples of the Realtime API in action over at Google Developers Blog as well.

  • Facebook Gets API Error Notifications

    Facebook Gets API Error Notifications

    In November of last year, Facebook introduced Developer Alerts to help developers know when something goes wrong with their app. The original alerts only covered breaking changes, app status changes and policy violations. Now Facebook is adding another important aspect of the development platform to it.

    Facebook announced today that Developer Alerts will now include API error notifications. When encountering an error, Facebook will alert you via email and Facebook notification. To keep spam down, it won’t be sending you an alert every time the API encounters an error. It will only do so if your app encounters an “abnormally high API error rate.”

    Here’s what you can expect to see:

    Facebook Gets API Error Notifications

    Facebook plans to roll out API error notifications starting today, and should be available to all apps in the coming weeks.

    Developers reported 295 bugs to Facebook this week, with 48 bugs being accepted for further review. The Facebook team also fixed 31 bugs this week. You can check out the full bugfix list at the blog post.

  • Amazon Mobile App SDK Makes Nice With Adobe AIR

    We recently reported on how Adobe AIR and Flash are being used to make the next generation of mobile titles. Now Amazon is tapping into these tools to bring its APIs to more people in mobile development.

    Amazon announced today that Adobe AIR native extensions for the In-App Purchasing and GameCircle APIs are now available to its mobile app developers. What this means is that games be developed with AIR can now easily integrate IAP and GameCircle without having to write any custom code.

    This is just the latest addition to the Amazon Mobile App SDK in recent months as the company has been aggressively courting developers by offering free tools that make the development process easier. The most recent addition was an Eclipse plugin that would make integrating Amazon APIs into Android apps much easier.

    Alongside mobile development, Amazon is getting into traditional PC development in a big way by offering its In-App Purchasing API to game developers who post free-to-play PC titles on Game Connect.

    In short, all of this shows that Amazon is getting really serious about gaming on mobile and desktop. The retail games business may be shrinking, but Amazon is poised to be a major player in the digital games business in the years to come. It’s Appstore for Android is already doing extremely well, and it will only get better from here on out if it’s able to secure exclusive titles and even stronger developer support.

  • Foursquare Hackathon Winners: Shame Yourself for Your Lack of Gym Motivation and More

    Foursquare held its annual Hackathon over the weekend, and they saw over 200 hackers participate in building apps using Foursquare’s API. Foursquare touts high participation in NYC, San Francisco, and “unofficial” sites like Myrtle Beach, Tokyo, and Los Angeles.

    Out of dozens of app submissions, Foursquare has chosen a winner. The Grand Prize goes to Gym Shamer, an app that allows users to set fitness goals and then calls them out, publicly, when they fail to meet them.

    Let’s say you set a personal goal of going to the gym three times in a week, If you don’t end up checking-in at the gym three times, Gym Shamer will publish that embarrassing news via your own Twitter and Facebook accounts.

    It may look something like this:

    Foursquare Gym Shamer app

    Other Grand Prize winners include Reward Board, an app that allows business owners to display real-time check-ins at their stores – including information on the mayor and leaderboards. Those business owners can set up rewards if they want, and even print out receipts for check-ins.

    And there are now over a dozen new apps you can connect to your Foursquare account, as they have been given Jury Prize honors from Foursquare. One such app is called FlashSquare, which is like Snapchat (or Facebook’s Poke). It allows users to share photos upon checking-in, but they will only be visible for a few seconds. Another app, DinerBeware, informs users about Health code violations at restaurants at which they check-in.

    For a complete look at all the prize winners, head on over to the Foursquare blog.

  • Facebook Introduces Custom Open Graph Stories With Flexible Sentences

    As a Facebook developer, are you frustrated by the rigid structure of Open Graph sentences? Facebook has a standard that it applies to every story so that each action is described in the same manner using the same action verbs. Honestly, it can get a little boring, and maybe even a little confusing. That’s why Facebook is now letting developers change up the sentences in custom Open Graph actions.

    Facebook announced that its introducing flexible sentences into Open Graph. The new feature will allow developers to customize the Open Graph stories that appear on user’s walls. As an example, Facebook used the app, Songkick, that allows users to find out when concerts are playing near their home. Here’s how the app would normally publish a story on Facebook:

    Facebook Custom Open Graph Stories Flexible Sentences

    As Facebook points out, the above story lacks context. It doesn’t actually let people know that Songkick is a concert app. With flexible sentences, the developers can now let people know exactly what the app does.

    Facebook Open Graph Flexible Sentences

    For even more control, Facebook has updated the configuration tool to list the most frequently used story formats first so developers know which ones will require customization.

    Facebook Open Graph Flexible Sentences

    Facebook notes that flexible sentences aren’t available for all Open Graph actions. Developers can only change the wording on custom actions. Built-in actions, which comprise the majority of Open Graph actions, will remain unchanged to provide a consistent experience across Facebook.

    Developers will gain access to flexible sentences today, and users will begin seeing them soon. If you want to learn more about flexible sentences, check out the documentation.

  • Facebook Lumps Breaking Changes Into Single Quarterly Updates

    For the past two years, breaking changes introduced to Facebook have been on a three month schedule with new changes announced each month. Developers had 90 days to implement the changes before they became permanent fixtures of the Facebook development platform. 2013 is bringing a new change to that schedule that will give developers more time to address these breaking changes.

    Facebook announced that its bundling breaking changes into a single quarterly update. Now developers will know every single breaking change being introduced to the platform for the quarter on the same day instead of having to wait for new updates each month. This means that developers will have the full quarter to implement all of the breaking changes without having to worry about new changes being introduced all the time.

    The change to a quarterly schedule will start in April when the breaking changes for July are announced. For now, developers will want to focus on implementing the following breaking changes scheduled to go live in April:

    Removing ability to POST to USER_ID/questions
    As it’s no longer possible for users to create questions, we will remove this functionality from the Graph API. POSTs to USER_ID/questions will fail.

    Removing version property/column
    We will remove the ‘version’ column from the ‘group’ FQL table and the ‘group’ Graph API object.

    Announced back in October, a number of breaking changes will also become permanent on January 9. Developers will want to make sure they have taken care of the following before then:

  • Removing unused splash_screen_url and gamebar_image_url properties
  • Removing Dashboard REST API methods
  • Using canonical URLs when fetching data using link_stat table

    • Finally, 115 bugs were reported this week, and 54 were accepted for further review. Twenty-free bugs were also fixed. You can check out the full list at the blog post.

  • Facebook Adds New Methods For Driving Traffic To Apps

    The past few weeks have been rather slow for Facebook’s Operation Developer Love updates. It almost seemed like the love was slowly fading away, but the social network came back in force last night with an update full of new features.

    First up, Facebook app developers now have the ability to link their app page with the app details page in the App Center. Doing so will create a number of new buttons of your app page that will hopefully drive more traffic to your apps. The first button is a “Go to App” or “Play Game” button that will appear at the top of the page. The right side of the app page will also include a link that says “Visit App Page” for those who want to check out information or ratings on App Center first.

    Before that, developers will have to make sure that their app is categorized as an “App Page” according to Facebook’s guidelines. The page must also contain the app name so as not to confuse any would be users. Both of these options can be changed in the “App Details” section of the App Dashboard.

    Facebook Adds New Ways To Drive Traffic To Apps

    To help further drive installs, Facebook has launched a new app promotion page to help developers learn how to properly promote apps across Facebook. The usual suspects are present such as mobile app install ads and sponsored results.

    In other news, the subscribe button on app and brand pages has now been changed to say “follow.” Facebook says the change came about as follow “resonates better with people who use Facebook.”

    Finally, the platform policies have been updated once again to address links to privacy policies. Facebook says that developers will not be able to use any data accessed by their apps outside of said app until the developer includes a “conspicuous link” to their privacy policy in the app. You can read more about this policy and others here.

    As for the weekly bug report, 286 were reported and 30 were fixed. Eleven bugs were accepted for further review. Check out the entire bug fix list at the blog post.

  • Twitter Breaks Down How It Uses PushState To Eliminate Latency

    A common complaint of Twitter is that there’s a quite a bit of lag when going from one part of Twitter to the other. The engineering team feels that they sufficiently solved the problem through an implementation of pushState, and have taken to their blog to explain how they did it.

    The Twitter engineering team says that pushState is part of the HTML5 History API – a set of tools that, as Mozilla puts it, “exposes useful methods and properties that let you move back and forth through the user’s history, as well as… manipulate the contents of the history stack.” As for pushState itself, the team at Twitter explains it as thus:

    While the pushState() method is used when navigating forward from A to B, the History API also provides a “popstate” event—used to mange back/forward button navigation. The event’s “state” property maps to the data passed as the first argument to pushState().

    If the user presses the back button to return to the initial point from which he/she first navigated via pushState, the “state” property of the “popstate” event will be undefined. To set the state for the initial, full-page load use the replaceState() method. It accepts the same arguments as the pushState() method.

    Here’s a visual explanation:

    Twitter Breaks Down How It Uses PushState To Eliminate Latency

    The team says that implementing pushState was relatively simple, but there were a few problems that they had to overcome. In particular, not every browser is up to date on the latest advances in the History API and programmers have to replicate behaviors that are otherwise present in full-page reloads.

    Other problems were present as well with one being that all browsers currently ignore the title attribute in pushState. All updates must be performed manually at the time being. Another problem arose from Firefox imposing a 640kb character limit on any serialized state objects that are passed to pushState.

    Despite all this, the team says they’re pleased with the HTML5 History API. They feel that it has improved rendering teams significantly on the Twitter Web page and app.

    If you want to play around with the History API or pushState, check out these two github projects from balupton and defunkt.

  • Facebook Announces Breaking Changes For March

    You’ll have to forgive the Facebook team this week. There’s not really much of an Operation Developer Love update presumably due to the team being in Paris this week for the LeWeb 2012 conference. With that being said, the social network did outline the next group of breaking changes that will be going into effect in March of next year.

    First up, however, is a look at the December breaking changes that will be going into effect today. Developers had a few months to implement the following changes, but there might be one or two in the list that you may have missed.

  • Removing the Static FBML Page tab app
  • New policies for desktop web games off of Facebook.com
  • offline_access permission removal
  • New security restrictions for OAuth authorization codes
  • Graph API will return full Custom Open Graph objects
  • Stripping HTML from Page description field

    • As for March 2013, there’s only three breaking changes that developers will need to keep track of. The first is that developers will no longer be able to access mailbox FQL tables without a user session. Next, Facebook will no display display apps under /me/accounts/ in the Graph API. The new location is /me/applications/developer/. Finally, graph.facebook.com will no longer redirect users to the Graph API documentation. As always, you can stay on top of this information and more by checking out Facebook’s developer roadmap.

    Perhaps mirroring the lack of any real development news, the bug report is equally barren. While 202 bugs were reported, only 20 were fixed. That being said, 59 bugs were accepted for further review. You can check out the full fix list at the blog post.

  • Twitter Creates A Timeline For Its API Announcements

    Do you know when Twitter will be sunsetting an API, or when it will be releasing a new API it has in the works? You can always follow the social network’s engineering blogs for the info, but there was no central location for all of this information until now.

    Twitter announced today that it’s releasing a timeline for its API announcements. It won’t be a place for Twitter to make announcements, bu rather a place for developers to keep track of all the announcements that Twitter’s engineering team makes over the course of a year. It’s a lot like Facebook’s developer roadmap that tells developers when certain changes will be going into effect.

    The calendar in its current form splits up API announcements into two categories – recent change and upcoming changes. Both categories list the date the change was or will be deployed, a short description, a link to the original announcement and the APIs that will be affected by the change.

    Twitter Creates A Timeline For Its API Announcements

    Twitter notes that the Timeline is not a replacement for its official blog or its API Twitter feed. Developers will still want to follow all the official sources for Twitter developer news. The calendar mainly serves as a reminder for the social network’s major announcements.

    That being said, the calendar is a major source of transparency and convenience for Twitter developers. It doesn’t change the fact that version 1.1 of Twitter’s API screws over developers, but it’s a decent consolation prize.

    Speaking of which, you have until March of next year to make the switch to version 1.1 of the API and all the regulations it brings.

  • Amazon Maps API Now Available To All

    As Apple has proven with its iPhone 5 maps blunder, people care about having quality maps on their mobile devices. Until now, however, there’s not been a maps API built specifically for the Kindle Fire. Amazon is fixing that this week.

    Amazon announced that its Maps API is now available for all developers. The API was available since September in an open beta, but this week marks the first time that it’s been available to everyone in a stable release. The retail giant says that its maps API has been developed with Kindle Fire apps in mind, and that various developers have already integrated into their own Kindle Fire apps.

    For now, the Amazon Maps API is pretty simple. It has two core features that developers can take advantage of:

  • Interactive Maps. You can embed a Map View in your app for customers to pan, zoom and fling around the world. You have the option to display a user’s current location, switch between standard maps and satellite view, and more.
  • Custom Overlays. You can display the locations of businesses, landmarks and other points of interest with your own customized markers and pins.

    • It should be interesting to see what developers will do with the Amazon Maps API on Kindle Fire devices. The obvious use of the API is to build mapping apps, but I can see game developers creating some pretty unique AR games using it. The API could also point to the existence of a rumored Amazon phone since the company will need its own maps app for such a device.

    Interested developers can grab the Maps API as part of the Amazon Mobile App SDK. Developers can also check out the documentation here.

  • Facebook Graph API Now Supports In-Game Groups

    The past week has been relatively slow in the world of Facebook development. When that happens, there’s a good chance that the weekly Operation Developer Love update will be bursting at the seams with new features and updates. Facebook didn’t disappoint as this week’s update is full of new features that developers will want to start trying out.

    The Graph API takes on another function this week as Facebook introduces groups for games and apps. Developers can use the Graph API to build up groups around their games. Much like regular Facebook groups or the more traditional clan in online gaming, game developers can invite strangers to join together in a group to work towards a common goal. It could potentially solve one of the major problems with social games – not having enough friends all playing the same game to unlock higher tier rewards.

    Like most new additions, Facebook is rolling groups out as a beta to all apps and games in App Center. More work will be put into it over time, but developers will want to help Facebook work out the kinks so both parties can provide the best experience possible to end users. Interested developers can get started now by reading the documentation.

    Before you get into Open Graph groups, developers first have to prove to Facebook that it can handle the responsibility of Open Graph. Developers can now upload screenshots of their Open Graph usage during the Open Graph Action submission process. This will help Facebook expedite the submission process by being able to see that new developers understand the Guidelines and responsibilities that come with Open Graph development.

    Fans of Facebook’s JavaScript SDK are in for a treat this week as there is now a debug version of the SDK now available. Facebook says that it’s loaded un-minified and contains stricter type checking. It will hopefully provide more accurate data on errors when developers are debugging their apps. You can see more here.

    Facebook’s Platform Policy page has been updated to address use of its social plugins. Developers who use Facebook’s own social plugins “must not sell or purchase placement or participate in any like exchange program.” You can read more.

    The Facebook for WordPress Plugin has been updated with improved stability, individual settings pages, custom poste type support, and custom post status support. Version 1.1 of the WordPress plugin requires WordPress 3.3 or newer. You can read more here.

    Facebook also announced today that all North American users are now being moved to the HTTPS protocol. The rest of the world will be following shortly. The move to HTTPS will make the site more secure for everybody.

    As always, Facebook rounds out its post with the weekly bug report. The social network reports that 236 bugs were reported this week, and 11 bugs were fixed. Thirty-eight bugs were accepted for further review. You can check out the full bug fix list at the blog post.

  • Google Maps Developers Talk Visualizations

    Google Maps is an integral part of many apps used across the Web and mobile devices. Developers need to know how to make the best use of the service. That’s why Google holds roundtables with the people working on these products to show off the new features hitting their respective services.

    Here’s what you can expect to see today from the folks behind Google Maps:

    For the second part of our “A Journey of 245k Points” series, Paul Saxman shows some cool tricks for creating stunning map visualizations of numerous ship voyages using polylines, making polylines interactive, and creating animations of voyages with symbols.

  • Facebook Imposes New Rules For The Notifications API

    Developers have been seeing some pretty positive results from the Notifications API. That’s the report today from Facebook as the social network updates us on the latest numbers from those participating in the beta that was announced back in August.

    If you’re not familiar with the new Notifications API, it’s essentially a method in which developers can send messages directly to players. Instead of having to wait for a player to boot up their game or see an email, the developer can send messages to the player via their notification feed on Facebook proper.

    Facebook reports that developers sending “high quality notifications” to active users are seeing click through rates of 25 percent or higher. They point out that this is significantly higher than traditional direct response channels like email. One developer in particular, KIXEYE, sees a 30 percent click through rate with War Commander.

    As said before, the key to getting such a high click through rate is to craft high quality notifications. As such, Facebook will now be implementing two new quality control measures for notifications on November 9:

  • No sending notifications to inactive users. Apps should only send notifications to users who have visited their app in the last 28 days. Data shows that user engagement drops sharply after this time and raises the risk your app will be flagged as spam.
  • High volume senders must maintain a minimum click-to-impression ratio. Apps sending a high volume of notifications must maintain a minimum 17% click-to-impression (CTI) ratio on notifications. Our data shows that apps with a CTI of 17% or higher will keep users coming back for a longer period of time. If your app dips below this threshold on a weekly basis, we may block access to notifications for your app.

    • For more information on these and other quality control measures, check out the documentation.

    Since the introduction of the Notifications API, Facebook has also featured Insights into how well said notifications were doing. Now you can separate notifications into groups and track each one with a custom ref_param. This will help you evaluate the performance of separate notifications so you can improve user response.

    The Notifications API is still in beta, but it looks like its coming along very well. Combined with the Mobile App Install Ads, developers now have more tools than ever to drive users to their apps.

  • Facebook Details The Latest Open Graph Changes

    It was announced yesterday that Facebook would be enacting a number of changes in Open Graph. It would force developers to increase the quality of their apps while increasing user satisfaction across the platform. Facebook now has more details on those changes.

    During the weekly Operation Developer Love update, Facebook says that developers will have to watch out for three major changes to Open Graph API. The first is the removal of the Authenticated Referrals feature. Instead, developers must implement the Auth Dialog. They will also be removing the ability to post to a user’s friends’ wall via the Graph API, but developers can still use the feed dialog. Lastly, custom Open Graph actions are no longer allowed in apps that automatically push stories as users consume content. Developers must now use built-in actions for such functionality.

    Developers may also be aware that Facebook has enabled a change that causes the picture Graph API to return a dictionary. They found that the change caught some developers off guard even when they had 90 days to prepare. In response, Facebook has extended the migration period to February 6 of next year. Interested developers can check out the Developer Roadmap for more information.

    The last update this week is a short reminder that Facebook will start removing internal features from the JavaScript SDK interface. Developers can check the console to see if any internal features are currently being used.

    As always, Facebook has been squashing bugs left and right. There were 182 bugs reported this week with 28 being fixed and 17 being accepted for further review. The full list of fixes is available at the blog post.

  • Facebook Hopes To Make Apps Better By Making Open Graph Stricter

    One of Facebook’s main strategies moving forward is to increase the number of apps with Facebook integration. This will increase the number of users visiting Facebook, and in turn increase their own advertising potential. That’s why Facebook has been pushing Open Graph, App Center and other developer tools to make sure those apps are the best they can be. The social network has determined that it’s still not good enough, and is now rolling out some more changes that developers will need to be aware of.

    First things first, Facebook is changing up how open graph stories display on a user’s feed. Their research indicates that stories with an image and location are among the most engaging. The apps that provide both will be given priority over other apps. Developers may not like that change, Facebook assures stories with both an image and location generate 70 percent more clicks with some stories even gaining 50 times more likes.

    Non-open graph stories, such as those published with stream.publish, will be presented in the old way. Facebook has a comparison shot of the same story in both ways to show the difference.

    Facebook Open Graph Apps

    The new format does look better once you get past the creep factor of having Facebook display a user’s precise location via Bing Maps. Of course, users have the final say on how much information apps can display with their apps, and that will presumably stay the same. For developers, you can start taking advantage of these new display options right now. Check out the documentation for more details.

    The other major change is concerned with the use of custom actions. In the past, these allowed apps to automatically publish stories to a user’s feed. Apps must now use Facebook approved built-in actions with their apps. This is to cut down on the instances where custom actions would “surprise and confuse people.” These built-in actions will still publish stories to a user’s feed automatically, but they will be done in a way that helps “set user expectations.”

    What about those developers who can’t find a built-in action that’s right for them? Facebook says that you should just “build a different experience that helps people share meaningful stories with friends.” In essence, you should innovate if Facebook’s own system fails you.

    Facebook is also deprecating two features that have resulted in high negative user feedback. The first is authenticated referrals which only serve to annoy users by asking for permissions with little context. Developers must move to using the standard Auth Dialog system.

    Secondly, Facebook is removing the Post to Friend’s Wall option in the API. Too many users were responding to friend’s posting apps on their wall by either clicking “hide” or “mark as spam.” Developers who still want to allow users to spam friends can invoke the feed dialog.

    Developers have 90 days to fix the aforementioned issues in their apps. After that, the app will be removed from Facebook until the proper fixes are applied to the app. At that point, developers can resubmit their app for approval.

    To help developers avoid such a fate, Facebook has updated their Open Graph guidelines page with all new info on quality expectations and tips on how to provide quality experiences to users.

  • Google Places API Team Talks New Features In Hangout

    The Google Places API has been seeing a constant barrage of updates this year. It could be a great new source of revenue for Google, and it’s great for businesses (except for this guy). That’s why it’s super important for developers to stay in the know in regards to changes coming to the Places API.

    The Google Places API product lead, Justin Chu, recently spoke with Google’s Luke Mahe during a Google hangout hosted from Sydney. In the Hangout, Chu goes over all the new features that are hitting the Places API.

    It’s a short conversation, but Places API developers should be able to get plenty out of it. They also have plenty to look forward to in the future as Google continues to expand the Google Places API.

    You can check out the latest developments in the Google Places API here.

  • Facebook Details Offers API Updates

    Brand pages have had the Offers tool in Facebook for quite some time now. It’s a great way to connect with fans by offering them free or discounted items for a limited time. The social network announced two major updates to Offers last week. Now Facebook is offering tips on how to best implement them.

    First and foremost, brand pages can now send QR codes or barcodes alongside their Facebook offers. It will allow brands to keep track of who is actually using the offers and how widespread the campaign gets.

    The second change is a bit more controversial. Facebook will now be requiring brand pages to create an ad alongside the offer. In essence, offers are no longer free. On the development side of things, Facebook says the “scheduled_publish_time” and the “published” paramaters will be silently ignored from now on. For more information on how to implement the changes in the Offers API, check out Facebook’s documentation.

    Developers should also be wary of the breaking changes going into effect on October 3. Starting next week, Facebook will stop allowing developers to use Custom Open Graph “like” and “follow” actions. Developers will have to switch to the built-in “like” and “follow” actions available in the Graph API. They are also removing the bookmark URL as developers can now use the “ref” parameter to track referrals.

    Others changes include the removal of the “offline_access” permission and the Live Stream plugin. The Live Stream plugin will be replaced by the Comments Box plugin starting October 3. Facebook is also replacing the summary field with the description field and removing the “position” field for photos. Finally, Facebook will now return a dictionary when developers access to the /picture connection.

    As for the weekly bug count, Facebook says that 210 bugs were reported since last week. Out of those, 33 were accepted and 24 were fixed. Check out the blog post for the full list of fixes.

  • Chrome Stable Release Now Supports First-Person Shooters

    Google updated the Chrome beta release last month with a number of HTML5 technologies. The most important, of course, being the pointer lock API. It allows the browser to replicate the mouse controls that native PC games have enjoyed for over two decades. All the new HTML5 goodness is now available to everybody.

    Google announced today that the latest stable release of Chrome features the pointer lock API. Regular Chrome users can now benefit from added precision that come from native mouse controls. A future of browser-based first-person shooters may be upon us.

    Google points Chrome users to try out Mozilla’s BananaBread. It’s a first-person shooter that takes advantage of all the latest HTML5 technologies including the pointer lock API. Another impressive features is that the game can take advantage of HTML5 and CSS for texture compression purposes. Browser-based 3D games can now look similar to early PS2 games.

    Google, like Mozilla, points out that the pointer lock API wasn’t just made for games. There are a number of applications, including medical and modeling, that will benefit greatly from the new API. Imagine a modeling application that can now run natively in your browser without the need for Flash or any plug-ins. It’s an exciting future and one that Google is embracing alongside Mozilla.

    Check out the Google Chrome release channel for the full list of changes. Windows 8 users will be especially happy to know that the newest version of Chrome contains further refinements. Here’s hoping they fixed the Metro Windows Store version of Chrome.