Word Buzz getting a better Twitter integration!

If you follow our tweets, which you should, you might have seen that we have been working hard on a better Twitter integration for Word Buzz. When looking around on github, I found a lot of frameworks for Twitter and iOS, but only Stefan's was lightweight and easy enough to integrate it into Word Buzz.

Most of the frameworks are full blown Twitter engines, which is not what we need for Word Buzz. Our requirements are simple: share your achievements (maybe your highscore in the future) with your followers. In addition to that, Twitter is our support channel. We wanted to allow posting public messages to @WordBuzzApp from within the App. Sounds easy, right? No need to pull in a full fledged Twitter engine for that!

Stefan's provides an API, which is really easy to use and integrate. There are no 3rd party dependencies, no need to fiddle with your linker flags - just an API to use! It even comes with a reasonable UI in Twitter style colors. Unfortunately, there was no iPad UI, which we had to implement myself. However, it was easy enough to come up with a Xib for iPad. Stefan's API provides delegate protocols, which you can implement to handle events such as "authentication succeeded". This way it's easy to separate the Twitter logic from your own code. The UIViewControllers provided, handle the most basic tasks like checking if you entered enough information to process with authentication.

We are using xAuth for authentication, which Twitter has to enable for your App. It took a couple of days until they came around to let us in, but it was the best solutions. Stefan's API provides xAuth out of the box and it works seamlessly. We added a Keychain integration to save your credentials and a flag in Settings.app to reset them.

Overall, it took us about 1 days to natively integrate Twitter into Word Buzz - thanks to Stefan's API! If anybody is interested, we are happy to provide the iPad UI and the Keychain integration.