From what I can tell it is due to the migration to oAuth authentication as seen in this recent article. Ours is one of the ‘obscure’ 3rd party apps that hadn’t migrated before the deadline.
Has anyone managed to integrate twitter using oAuth and if so could they please give a run-down of the process? From what I have read you need to apply for certification from twitter but when I went to the web page to apply it didn’t seem to have anything that suited an iPhone application (it had web application where a URL is used to callback and a desktop application option)
I did a quick test with an openfeint game to see how they handled it and it worked fine without the whole ‘pin number’ view and entry garbage that everyone seems to think is necessary now.
Basically, openfeint are able to login as if it were the old system (by passing your username and password) and nothing else… I thought oAuth was all about using the twitter site to specify the app you want to allow login priveliges to and then managing those apps so they never have your actual username and password?
the title on that article is a bit missleading. cause its not new, it was always the recommended way to talk to twitter … they just offered a far less secure (and abuse risking) way in addition … but I think they have now warned for a good 6 months or so on their api doc page, that they intend to drop the insecure access pattern, that you should develop your app to use oauth authentification. Guess they now have just reached the point where they are pissed by the ignorance of developers over their recommendation so they force it, point.
That being said dreamora, and yes we are guilty of not keeping up to date with the twitter announcements, I welcome any theories as to how Open Feint are avoiding the entire process.
They still allow a user to enter their username and password via the openfeint setup and from that moment forward you can fire tweets from the game at will. Every example I have found involves a horrid series of launching browser windows and gathering pin numbers via user interaction and entering said pin numbers into the application manually to provide permission to the app to post to twitter.
End of the day, if oAuth requires users to memorise or copy / paste 7 digit pin numbers, it is pretty much useless to us iPhone developers as that will exclude 99% of the casual gaming market. It has to be simple and easy otherwise it will not be used. So open feint are either doing something very clever indeed or they have some kind of magical agreement with twitter that allows them to still access the deprecated api’s when everyone else is excluded…
you can automatically copy that from the html stream behind the scene and enter it for example. regex is one of the ways, just searching for the right block can do it too though.
twitters api offers a way for authentification too from what I recall last looking at it, that doesn’t require it manually copying it over.
also as oAuth is a webstandard kind off, I’m sure they have an api you can call that answers you with xml or json response, not with html pages. saving you the whole regex stuff etc
and I’m sure there are 1+++ objc oauth libraries, that should all also work (potentially of comes with one and uses oauth itself)
What you want is Xauth which allows you to skip the whole redirect to Twitter page stuff. You can enable it only by setting up API access on dev.twitter.com and then requesting it. They usually get you setup within a couple days.
If there is enough interest, I can put together a plugin. I have extensive experience with Twitter, Oauth, Xauth and all that fun stuff. The last app I made was a Twitter app: Tweets.