xAuthTwitterEngine library and demo
xAuthTwitterEngine is a library and demo that aims to simplify the process of adding Twitter xAuth authentication to your iPhone apps.
oauth
1 Mar 2010
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.
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.
Twitter fixes oAuth for desktop and mobile with xAuth
Twitter's xAuth implementation is a timely and pragmatic solution that adapts oAuth to the needs of mobile and desktop applications. I applaud Twitter for taking the lead with this.
Dion Almaer writes on Ajaxian:
If a site groks OpenID the browser should be able to pass that over without having me intervene at all. It could hide the entire login process if we came up with a microformat to let all sides know what is going on. (OpenID and OAuth in the browser?)
My friend and fellow Brightoner Simon Willison of Django/OpenID fame has just released a lovely little mashup called wikinear that uses FireEagle and Wikipedia to show you Wikipedia articles that are relevant to your current location.