ApolloIM is an iPhone Instant Messenger Client, which is based upon libFiretalk.

Author notes:

8/30/07

Firstly, I want to thank the person who donated $300 to the new team. These kind of donations keep me working hard, and now that we have a real team coming together, will keep us focused. If you wish to help out, every little bit helps, and will be used 100% towards materials needed while coding. Just contact us and we’ll set you up with our paypal information.

Now, on to the news…

Suspend support is partially working. You can go and use other programs, and ApolloIM will still stay open.

The main problem with suspend is that the iPhone goes into a low power mode when shoved into your pocket waiting for a call – and this mode will shut off edge / wifi. Simply pinging the server won’t keep the wifi up, as it seems the kernel does its best to plain unload it. I don’t know what the prospective fix for this, one idea would be to move to a client/remote daemon, which would mean you would run a client on your home computer which would record all the incoming messages to you and send it over to you (and when your phone goes off, you’d still be on, because the daemon is still running).

Suspend as whole, however, should work while you’re playing music. If you’re playing a song while ApolloIM is on and in your pocket, it will keep the iphone active enough to keep the program connected. The trick for me here is to find how exactly Apple does that, and well, I’m on the case.

I’ve also improved the Conversation window, at the cost of making the Send button uglier – if you have problems with the send button, aim for hitting the “text” on the button. You no longer can type in the main window, and I may release another update very soon to use “text bubbles” like iChat uses. I have removed the keyboard button in favor of just being able to tap the main view to bring up the keyboard (or you can tap the sendfield at the bottom which,like MobileSMS, will bring up the keyboard).

This will be the last update for a while. I have been working alone on this project since it’s beginning, but the team has started to come together. It was kind of funny to see people say “The ApolloIM team” when it was just me, but thanks to my initial release, I’ve gotten some star players to help out. Notably Dankow who will be working on the interface and keeping code tidy, and Core who has stepped up to help us get libpurple worked out. If you know libpurple well, and would enjoy helping us integrate it, please send me an email at arminius2@gmail.com .

LibPurple will enable us to have Yahoo, MSN, Jabber, and GTalk support when we get it ready, as well as fix the “Buddy’s not showing up” error. I suspect my current implementation of libfiretalk is bugged, and I can either work on exchanging it for a different version or get purple working an adding support for the other services. I’m told one solution could be for you to create a new screen-name and import your buddylist with a “real” client, and then not to change the formatting of any names. It’s cumbersome, but until we get Libpurple working, it’ll have to do.

http://code.google.com/p/apolloim/