So I’ve spent the weekend working my way through Facebook’s Open Stream API and have made a ton of progress in adding the option to read your Facebook news feed from RSS Bandit. In my previous post I should the initial screenshots where you can login to Facebook via RSS Bandit to begin the authentication process to retrieve your news feed. Below are a few more screenshots showing how much progress has been made

Fig 1: This is the screen where you give RSS Bandit permission to access your news feed. Note that this is different from the screen where you login to Facebook via RSS Bandit. You should only see this screen once but will get the login screen quite often unless you select the option to stay signed into Facebook via RSS Bandit.

Fig 2: This is what your Facebook news feed looks like in RSS Bandit with the default stylesheet for Facebook applied. As you can see from the screen shot I’ve attempted to replicate the look of the news feed as best as I can in RSS Bandit. This includes options below each item to comment or see who has liked an item.

Fig 3: There is also support for viewing the comments on a Facebook item inline within the Feed Details list view. Although this is different from how Facebook does it, I felt this was needed to make it consistent with the other inline comment viewing experiences within RSS Bandit.

There’s still a bunch of cleanup to do such as fix up the look of comments when you click on them and provide a way to post comments on your friends’ Facebook items. This is probably another day or so of work which I’ll do next weekend. After that it is back to fixing bugs and working with Torsten on our idea from over two years ago on how to add a Office 2007 style ribbon to the application.

Below are pictures of the initial prototypes which Torsten has dusted off and will start working on again

I’ll follow up this post with some of my thoughts on writing a desktop application that targets Facebook’s Open Stream API. The process was definitely more painful than I expected but the results are worth it which says a lot about the functionality provided by the API.