1. I was the frontman (singer/songwriter/guitarist) for a band.  We released an album which you can preview and purchase on iTunes.  Personal favorite: track 4.  The band called it quits after the drummer and bass player broke up.  Bonus cliché: I delivered pizza for most of my musical career.
2. Favorite guitar: Fender Telecaster HS (humbucker in the neck position).  When I learned that Fender stopped making them, I bought a second one on eBay and had it professionally set up.
3. My hobby is collecting hobbies.  Music, writing, photography, web stuff, Mac fanboyism, video, social media, cooking, painting, collecting movies, design, drawing, and collecting domain names.  My unmaintainable list of hobbies means I’m not especially good at any one of these things.
4. I was a contributing author for this book.  I wasn’t paid.
5. I’ve been skydiving.  If you haven’t done it, you should.
6. I have a tattoo on my left arm.  It’s the logo for one of my favorite bands, and reminds me that no matter how much of a corporate tool I become, I’m still a wannabe rock star at heart.
7. My hair used to be very long.  Like down to my ass.  I looked like a girl.  Years later, I maintain that cutting it was one of the best decisions I have ever made.

I’m going to risk death and dismemberment now by breaking the chain.  Primarily because I can’t think of seven people who have blogs and haven’t already participated.  I reserve the right to reverse this decision at any time.

BeejiveIM has hit the App Store with their entry in the battle for iPhone IM superiority.  Let’s get right to it.

Aside from XMPP, Beejive offers AIM, ICQ, MSN/Windows Live, MySpace IM, and Yahoo! Messenger support.  Their XMPP support comes in two flavors: “Jabber”, or pre-configured Google Talk.  Strangely, configuring a GTalk account as a “Jabber” account doesn’t work, despite being the same thing.  This is a curiosity, but not a limiting factor by any means.

Adding my primary XMPP account was relatively straightforward, with my ridiculously long password as the lone speed bump.  During configuration, I was struck by the ability to set up a resource, set my client priority, choose a host and port, and determine whether I wanted TLS or legacy SSL (no option for plaintext authentication).  This is already feeling like a real XMPP client.

The login process was similarly confident, offering me the choice between available, away, busy, and invisible presence settings, and the option to set a custom status message for each.

Rich presence?  In my iPhone client?  It’s more likely than you think.

Their “Buddy List” sorts contacts by group (“list by account” is also an option), displaying your contact’s nickname, JID, status, full presence, their avatar, and an icon indicating which IM service they’re using.  If I had to ask for something here, it would be merged contacts, but the interface is solid enough to make this less of an issue.

Chatting is a thing of beauty.  Outgoing messages, as they are typed, are shown in a semi-transparent bubble, giving a clear visual cue when the user is typing, and making the absolute best possible use of screen real estate.  This is by far my favorite feature of Beejive, and one I expect other clients to adopt in the future.  Once the “send” button is hit, messages are shown in the iChat bubble style of the SMS app.

My other favorite feature, and the one most likely to be shown off, is landscape mode.  Yes, you can rotate your iPhone to get a larger keyboard.  Of course, this comes at the cost of message visibility, but the rotation-switch happens quickly and seamlessly.

Now for the obvious question: “does it proxy?”  Yes.  But here’s the good news, from Beejive’s privacy policy:

We do not collect or store any of your instant message (“IM”) account information, such as your user name and password, messages, or contact lists, except that we temporarily store your instant messages solely in order to complete the instant message communication (for example, in response to a dropped call); however after the communication is complete the instant message is deleted from the Beejive system.

Completely fair, and Beejive has a solid reputation.  And compared to MobileChat, their servers are stable and fast.  As a positive side-effect, Beejive servers can notify the client that a message was not delivered, resulting in a cute interface cue to let the user choose whether to attempt re-sending.  There is also an in-app option to set up email alerts if messages come in while you’re doing something else.

Now for the bad news.  At $15.99, it’s difficult to tell if the price is driven by arrogance or ignorance.  This is a fantastic offering, to be sure, but the price will keep many potential users away.  I’ll be shocked if the price is still above $9.99 a month from now.

Beejive has thought of everything, including a built-in help system.  This may be the best 1.0 release I’ve ever seen, and the future looks very promising.  From the iTunes description (emphasis mine):

Coming soon, group chats, emoticons, and full hyperlink support!

BeejiveIM is beautifully designed, expertly implemented, and offers a new level of reliability.  Could it be that we finally have a viable XMPP client for the iPhone?  Yes.

Update: pictures.

      

I understand that people are frustrated and are tired of waiting and Shaun and I feel absolutely terrible. However, all I can offer is your money back. For that, please go to support.twenty08.com and submit a request for a refund.

Blocking updates is orders of magnitude worse than rejecting applications to begin with, because money has already changed hands.  I paid full price for MobileChat, which is, frankly, broken.  But forgivable.  It was a first release, and the developers wanted to be first to market with a real IM client.  I maintain that MobileChat is still a superior product and service to its competition, but if the final word is that I’ll never get an update, I want my money back.

From a developer’s perspective, the App Store may be too much of a gamble; even if your app is accepted today, a future update may be rejected, and you may have to give all of the money back.  From a user’s perspective, your software could see end-of-life at any moment.

Cisco announced today that it has acquired Jabber, an open-source IM and presence protocol used by Google Talk and Gizmo, for an undisclosed sum.

This is so flawed as to be laughable, and very well sums up the quality of research and fact-checking that goes into a typical TechCrunch story.  Still, XMPP is colloquially referred to as the “Jabber protocol”, so this kind of mistake is almost forgivable in the form of, say, an uninformed Slashdot submitter.

Luckily, we have Jack Moffitt to clear things up for us; Cisco is acquiring Jabber, Inc, not the protocol.  Meanwhile, Saint Peter has stepped up to quiet any rumors or innuendo vis a vis the impact this acquisition might have on the XSF or Jabber, Inc morale:

I’m excited to be part of the Cisco team, and I think the whole community will see even more good things happening because of their support.

Argh mateys, Jabber has been boarded by Cisco: http://tinyurl.com/4juk53

WebMessenger requires an account with Callwave before any of the IM services can be used.  They got my confirmation email to me quickly after I signed up, but I don’t see any good reason to put me through this unless they’re doing some kind of undocumented proxying.  Once I was signed into their service, I was asked to set up an IM account.  I picked Jabber, naturally, but not before having to restart the app twice to get it to offer me a choice of services.

After all of that, I was asked to import my “Buddy List” (an AOL trademark, by the way).  I have no idea what this button was supposed to do, but my roster never loaded, and I wasn’t able to test the chat functionality.  When I attempted to test with a second XMPP account to be sure it wasn’t something on my server, I discovered that only one Jabber account is allowed.  This is where I gave up.

“WebMessenger” is a great name for this app, since it has nothing to do with the Web, and doesn’t function as a messenger.  I expect more from a 1.0 release, especially when two functional XMPP clients have already been released on the App Store.  WebMessenger may be free, but isn’t worth the headache.

It’s not that XMPP is not up to the job; people just keep making the same mistakes while trying to implement it.

Bonus points for Blaine Cook‘s comment below the article.