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Comment by zacaltman | Hacker News Reader

First off, Parse is awesome and I love it!

I have the same concerns (although I already have apps using Parse in the wild!): • Will FB kill off Parse? Seems quite unlikely in the short term, but in the long term? • Are they going to try and force any integrations with FB? • Will Parse continue to improve (they've done a lot of this recently!) or will it dwindle as others move faster? • Data / Privacy - what's going to happen with those going forward? These always are a concern in people's minds when FB comes up. • Facebook's APIs / Developer Support is SHIT... will this happen to Parse too?

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Totally agreed that Parse kicks ass, which is why we bought them; we're looking forward to working with the team to continue to improve it!

As a brand new member of the team, I'm really keen to hear more about how we've failed at our APIs and developer support and what we could do to be way better.

Late last year, I've tried to integrate Facebook into two tiny iOS apps. It sucked, and I'm not going to touch Parse in the future.

One of the few things I needed was an app request dialog. It didn't seem possible from the SDK docs (at least not clearly so), the only way was to use the deprecated global Facebook object:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13351584/how-to-send-user...

There was no definitive list of possible values for the dialog name or parameters either. Apparently "message" was being ignored, but only for "feed" dialogs...? Apparently there is a replacement now, but it's still in beta. How am I supposed to tell my clients what is possible (and sustainable) and what isn't?

The replacement is FBWebDialogs, and it's not beta.

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/howtos/send-requests-us...

The definitive list of properties for the request dialog is documented here https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/dialogs/reque...

Thanks, good to know. Apparently they have been added in SDK 3.2, which was released after we gave up.

Two examples of inconsistent documentation that I've seen while looking this information up:

The documentation for common dialog parameters still links to the deprecated API even though there are web and native dialogs now: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/dialogs/

The iOS Games SDK refers to SDK 3.1 in its introduction but uses FBWebDialogs, and my old copy of the SDK (3.1.1) does not have them yet.

Thanks for that, will follow up and get those updated.

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