helloworlder

So, this is my 2nd Facebook book app and it’s an FBML app this time, not an iframe. You can find it at http://apps.facebook.com/makedebate . It’s called “Make Debate” and you can share your (passionate?) opinion on topics with friends and other Facebook users.

It’s more fun (and easier) to build a site using FBML rather than using an IFRAME app. You can just use FBML tags rather than lots of PHP API calls.

This was my first Facebook app and can be found at http://apps.facebook.com/try-to-pronounce-it

What the app does it let you upload pronunciations of phrases in a foreign language and share it with others. I think the fatal flaw of this app would have to be that users have to upload WAV files instead of any format they want. This opens up a lot of issues with usability. For example, the windows sound recorder does not by default save the recorded sounds as WAVs, and since WAVs are uncompressed they are large. In addition, streaming WAVs in the browser is awkward - whereas with MP3 files I could just use a SWF player to stream the files in a nice way.

In fact, at once point I had successfully implemented the FFmpeg library to allow the user to upload almost any file type they want, and the app would automatically convert that file to MP3. Also, since the files were all in MP3 format, I could stream it in a nice SWF player. Unfortunately I discovered that the MP3 (and other codecs) were patented and the usage of them wasn’t actually legal. Pesky software patents …

Now I’m back from Europe and starting to look for a job. While the job seeking is going on, I’m going to try to give myself a challenge that is to try and create one web app each week until I get a job!

The first web app should be up in a few days (err, hopefully).

EDIT: Well this is taking more than a week, but I should have my first Facebook App up within a day or two. It’s written in PHP. At first I wanted to use the Codeigniter framework but it was virtually impossible getting it to gel with Facebook so I went with straight PHP, unfortunately.