Beginning iOS Programming: Building and Deploying iOS Applications

Chapter 7Integrating Social Media

WHAT YOU LEARN IN THIS CHAPTER:

• Sending e-mails and text messages
• Posting to Twitter, Facebook, and Flicker
• Creating the same sharing experience as Apple apps

WROX.COM CODE DOWNLOADS FOR THIS CHAPTER

You can find the wrox.com code downloads for this chapter at www.wrox.com/go/begiosprogramming on the Download Code tab. The code is in the chapter 07 download and individually named according to the names throughout the chapter.

Social networking has become a ubiquitous term you hear everywhere today. It’s also a bit hard to define. For some, it can be as simple as sending an e-mail or a text message. For others, it means having a Twitter or Facebook account to share your thoughts and pictures with friends and family or to market your business. Then there are other services such as Flickr and YouTube or one of the hundreds of other similar services. What all these have in common is the ability to share things with groups of people using software and services.

Integrating with social networking services is a popular feature to add to iOS apps. It gives your app a built-in avenue for viral marketing. When users like a particular app, they’re more likely to tell their friends how great of an app it is. Allowing them to do this easily without needing to leave your app can help make your app a commercial success.

In the not-so-distant past, it was a daunting task to add social networking to an app. First, developers would need to choose which networks ...