Submitted by Brendan on 12/07/2011
Social media is one of the best ways to promote your brand and products to the public, and in the case of app development it has become a critical part of the user experience. With short deadlines and ever-changing API's for social services
(I'm looking at you Facebook) having a functional, stable, and useful implementation of social networking features can take more time and upkeep than the core functionality of your app. Enter: ShareKit. A new open-source project that aims to make incorporating social media a trivial task so that developers can spend their time and effort on real functionality, instead of fighting with implementation issues. ShareKit is a free, open-source project for iOS. With a promised setup time of "less than 15 minutes," any developer can instantly add social features to their app with little to no effort. Although it isn't an incredibly flexible implementation (very much a one-size-fits-all), it provides an excellent starting point for building more complex features off of the foundation of ShareKit. One of the hardest problems for independent developers is getting their app noticed. With solid social media integration, a good idea can travel like wildfire. With a project as easy to use as ShareKit, any app could be the next big hit.