“At the end of the day, you will get a taste of what we are doing … but this is a tip of the iceberg to energise and propel you into future careers,” Monash University Sunway Campus’ Head of School of Information Technology Prof Chris Messom said in his welcome address.

Over the two days, participants had a taste of creating and customising an iPhone application with Mr Jason Khong, a School of IT alumnus and founder of Apptivity Lab – a pioneer amongst local iPhone applications development companies.

A digital workshop was held concurrently, conducted by School of IT Lecturer Mr Tom Chandler who guided the students through key areas of modelling, simulation, visual effects and rendering of the Autodesk Maya application. All participants sat through both workshops.

Read full story at Monash University Sunway Campus.

While the answer is very much dependent on the objectives of each individual app, the use of Facebook Connect seems to be on the rise. This first look will be an initial investigation into what it is, how to implement and what are the pros and cons of using Facebook Connect for iPhone.

What is it?

Facebook Connect for iPhone is a Objective-C library that you can include in your app. It handles login, user session, user feed and can be used to call methods in the Facebook API.

You can see it in use in apps here:

1. 10 Fantastic iPhone Apps that use Facebook Connect
Notably “PhoneBook”, which syncs the iPhone Address Book with Facebook friend’s profile photos; “ThisMoment”, which lets an author posts ‘moments’ to his/her Facebook stream.

2. Facebook Connect for iPhone now like, First apps released (back in 14th March 2009)
“Who has the biggest brains” app uses is to share user’s top scores on Facebook.

How to use it?

1. Create a Facebook application for your iPhone application. You need to create the FB app, to get an application ID that will be used by your iPhone app. See “Using Facebook Connect for iPhone“.

2. Add FB Connect to Xcode project. Code currently lives at Github Facebook Connect for iPhone. Also remember to grab the official FB Connect buttons.

3. Do interesting stuff with it. Developer documentations are at http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Facebook_Connect_for_iPhone.

Pros and Cons?

A custom/internal user management system is not trivial to implement, especially from scratch, and more so if it is not a core feature required for an iPhone app. But if there already is an existing user system, then I guess that should be the clear choice in order to grow the registered user base.

Facebook Connect, on the other hand, provides a “quick and dirty” way to manage users. Chances are, most users already have a FB account. Users are probably more comfortable revealing information about themselves to FB than to a relatively unknown web service (well, compared to FB, who isn’t?). Facebook Connect can also be a first step towards “social apps” that take advantage of a user’s existing friend networks to do interesting stuff.

Some questions left unanswered at this point are:

1. Is there a way to list / manage all the people who have logged in through my application?

2. Can I access additional user demographic information (gender, location, age, etc) through FB Connect?