Native IM client for iPhone

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 29 August 2007 02:45

Your IT - Mobility

Apart from the soldered-in battery, one of the more frequent complaints about the iPhone is its lack of an instant messaging client.

ApolloIM aims to fill that gap. A GPLed project residing on Google Code, ApolloIM is initially limited to AIM. That restriction is only temporary, as the plan is to drop the Firetalk library in favour of Purple as used by Adium and other IM clients.

"The idea is to provide an 'Adium' for the iPhone, and we're moving towards it," said project owner Arminus2.

The initial release ("Version Negative One") is openly described as "buggy" and has been made available in order to test the usability of the application.

Planned improvements include support for suspend and for vibrating alerts.

For those that prefer to avoid the hack necessary to install third-party applications on an iPhone, meebo (the multi-protocol web based IM client) has a mini version to suit the small screen.

Meebo supports AIM, YIM, Google Talk, MSN, ICQ and Jabber.