Inspiration
My roommates have been wanting to make an app together and our idea involved Facebook integration. I saw this hackathon as an opportunity to learn the skills I needed to make an app.
What it does
It has a button that takes you to a facebook login window then takes you to a different screen after logging in that displays your name which it pulled off your profile.
How I built it
I started by installing the necessary Facebook APIs using cocoa pods. Next I laid out a very simple UI with a button that I could connect actions to. I connected the button to a Facebook Login request and set the success action to switching ViewControllers to my second view. I then implemented loading the user's profile and pulling the name of the user to be displayed when the second view is loaded.
Challenges I ran into
Swift is a newer language and it still changes very rapidly. The Facebook API manual was out of data as well as most of the Swift documentation I was referencing. Therefore I spent a lot of time trying to fix syntax errors from learning outdated code. It took me a long time to figure out how to hard code a segue (switching of ViewControllers) because nearly all the tutorials only showed how to connect a segue to a button which wasn't useful in my case scenario. I spent a lot of time debugging why the user profile wasn't loading. It was hard to debug because the problem looked like it had to do with unwrapping the optional; however, the actual problem lied with how the API functioned, requiring the profile to be loaded even after being initialized along with the AccessToken during login.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
I'm proud that I learned Swift and iOS development in such a short amount of time, and not only making an app but also incorporating Facebook's API into my project.
What I learned
Of course through all the workshops I learned about iOS development, Swift, web security, machine learning, etc. However beyond that, I learned that I am capable of learning so much in a measly 12 hours. I learned that it's possible to turn my ideas into reality.
What's next for First App - Table 50
Continuing with what my roommates and I have in mind, the next steps would be to incorporate the Venmo API for a payment method and incorporate more functionality from the Facebook API including posting from the user's account and displaying other user's posts. More work will obviously need to be put into the UI. I would also like to look into using some sort of Google platform as a method of data hosting.
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