AIM for the iPhone receives push notifications, becomes useful

One of the most anticipated features of the iPhone 3.0 firmware has certainly been push notifcations.  These alerts allow for information to be pushed to the iPhone and received by certain applications even though these apps cannot run in the background.  The feature has been a long time coming and, now that it’s here, it will start making many applications much more useful.

One of those applications is AIM - AOL Instant Messenger.  If you’re like me, you have a buddy list full of friends that you chat with on a regular basis and, sometimes, you want to use AIM while you aren’t at your desk.  The iPhone app has been around for awhile but was utterly useless for one reason - if AIM wasn’t running, you couldn’t receive messages.  I don’t know about you, but I like to do other things on my phone besides run AIM.  This is where push notifications have improved the app.

Thanks to an upgrade available today, AIM now supports push, and the app has become a million times better.  Once you’re signed into AIM on your iPhone, you can feel free to back out of the app and do other things - check email, play music, browse the web and so on.  If a friend sends you an instant message over AIM, an alert is pushed to your iPhone and a small box pops up on your device.  This box can be customized to include as much as the screen name and message, or it can simply tell you that you have a new IM.  Because AIM is not running in the background and you only receive these alerts when new IMs come in, you won’t notice much of a difference in battery life - a key factor in Apple’s decision to use push instead of multitasking.

If you haven’t already downloaded the new AIM application, head into the App Store (either in iTunes or on your iPhone) and download the latest update.  The change definitely takes the app out of the “neat but useless” category and makes it a must have for anyone who uses AIM.

June 23rd, 2009 by Shawn Farner | Posted in Uncategorized | (0)