I just released an open source library and a sample application to make it easy for you to implement Twitter's new browserless xAuth authentication mechanism in your iPhone apps. You can download the source code or fork it from the XAuthTwitterEngine repository on Github.

Twitter started rolling out access to its new xAuth beta to developers over the weekend. As you may know, I'm a big fan of xAuth for mobile and desktop applications and as such I began implementing xAuth in Feathers right away.

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I love that you can embed Base64-encoded images in CSS and that WebKit understands them.

Here, for example, is a way to add my Open in External App icon to links that you capture from a UIWebView to display in Mobile Safari:

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Those of you following my tweets may have seen that I was rather frustrated this week at Twitter's oAuth policy with regard to desktop and mobile applications.

In a nutshell, Twitter requires any new applications that use the Twitter API to use oAuth for authorization if they want to display the source parameter in tweets. The source parameter is the little bit of text and the link to your app that appears at the bottom of tweets (e.g., via Tweetie). It constitutes a very important bit of organic marketing for Twitter apps.

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If you let XCode's code completion create your switch statement for you, you might run into this little gotcha.

The following code...

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I recently ran into a bug with the insertion point and selection magnifying glasses malfunctioning on a UITextView in a simple UIView that I had set up using Interface Builder.

The symptoms were that the touch-and-hold insertion point magnifying glass would appear and work properly only the first time it was used. It would then add some visual corruption to the text view and refuse to appear on subsequent touch-and-holds. The selection magnifying glass would work and, after using it, the insertion point magnifying glass would also work (but again, just once).

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