AIM will even tell you how many messages are waiting. You can flick back and forth between chats by swiping your finger left or right when in a conversation (the number of dots at the bottom tells you how many chats you have open), or by jumping back to the Active IMs section and choosing any of the contacts listed there. You can scroll through your chat history by flicking a conversation up or down.ĪIM also lets you carry on multiple conversations simultaneously, conveniently grouping them in one Active IMs section. Messages are attractively displayed with time stamps and buddy icons, and are easy to read. Tap any contact and the chat interface will slide in with the iPhone's touch keyboard primed and ready. And if you have buddies who use multiple screen names, there's no way to group them as one contact, like many desktop IM clients allow. So it's a good thing that the Buddy List also displays status messages and icons for all your buddies it makes it a wee bit easier to remember who, for example, "macluvr038201" is. It would be awfully nice if AIM could pull the actual names from the iPhone's contacts, but upon investigation it appears that IM screen names are not actually synced between your Mac's Address Book and the iPhone. For example, a buddy I deleted in AIM still showed up in Adium on my MacBook for a while.Īlso, while the groups list their total members and how many are currently online, they only display the names of those who are logged in-there's no way to find out which offline contacts are in a group without going through your whole list of contacts one-by-one.Īnother gripe is that the Buddy List shows only the screen names of your contacts, not their actual names-unless you've manually entered an actual name into the Nickname field in your Buddy's profile. Removing a buddy does seem to remove them from your master Buddy List, but the change can take some time propagate. While you can edit your Buddy List and groups from the phone, I was wary of doing so, since nowhere is it spelled out precisely what happens when you make those changes. You can view any user's profile by tapping the small blue arrow next to their name, send them a message by tapping on their name, or add them to a list of favorites, just like in the iPhone's Phone application. Once you're logged in, you'll have access to your complete AIM Buddy List, including groups. If you leave the last setting to "Off," then your account will continue to receive messages when you quit the app, though you won't see them until you launch the program again. In those settings, you also have the option to deactivate AIM's sounds (though the iPhone will still vibrate every time you receive a message unless you turn vibrate off entirely) and decide whether your account should be signed out when you leave the program. That's annoying for those who maintain multiple accounts, but it's also the way Apple asked developers to implement preferences. The application does not support logging in under multiple accounts simultaneously and if you want to switch to another account, you'll have to navigate to the iPhone's Settings application and change the information there. Mac/MobileMe usernames will work as well. Launching AIM for the first time will prompt you for login credentials-AIM supports only its eponymous network, though. With Apple's prohibition on background applications, you can only use AIM when it's in the foreground at WWDC, Apple announced plans to roll out a push-notification system in September that will allow users to be alerted when messages arrive, even if AIM isn't active. Let's get one thing out of the way right up top: AIM on the iPhone is not going to be a replica of your usual desktop chatting experience. So while the answer is probably not, the client is actually quite good at what it does, despite some noticeable limitations. There are plenty of workarounds, to be sure, but they ranged from potentially expensive (like using the iPhone's SMS system) to slow (web-based applications) to illicit (clients that ran on jailbroken phones).īut along with the launch of the App Store also came the first official native instant-messaging client, AOL's free AIM, as well as a brand new $64,000 question: was it everything that instant messengers in search of a constant connection had been dreaming and hoping for? Life, unfortunately, is constantly full of disappointments. One of the most frequently voiced complaints about the iPhone since its introduction last year has been a lack of instant messaging support.
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