By My App World
BeejiveIM with Push
I have been a dedicated user of IM+ for my instant messaging aggregation since I purchased my iPad last April. About 2 months ago I tried out BeejiveIM and can say it’s a great iPad App for those who need to manage multiple IM accounts. While IM+ and BeejiveIM do the exact same thing, BeejiveIM’s beautiful and easy to use layout nudges it ahead. For readers who already own IM+, I don’t think it is worth spending the extra money since the $9.99 can be used to buy another iPad app. But if you have multiple social media or instant messaging accounts and use them regularly, BeejiveIM is the best multi-account instant messaging app available in the iTunes store right now. If you use just one service exclusively like Google Talk, just download the free version of the iPad. Every service provides a free iPad App.
Interface
BeejiveIM is an iPad App that allows you to manage all your Instant Messaging accounts. It supports all the major platforms such as Facebook, AOL Instant Messenger, Google Talk, Jabber Servers, MySpace, Windows Live Messenger and more. You can set up any of your instant messaging accounts and BeejiveIM allows you to log into, and out of, any account. You don’t have to be online with every account when the program is active. Adding an account for Beejive is quick and easy. Simply hit the honeycomb icon and you will start setting up your IM accounts.
While the app works both in landscape and portrait mode, I found that the iPad App was most useable in landscape mode. This is mainly due my preference of a larger iPad keyboard, which is found in the landscape mode. Both layouts work fine but the in my humble opinion, the portrait mode chat window takes too much of the screen real estate.
The interface is simple, customizable, and highly useable. Usability is too often overlooked in mobile programming since most developers try to do each other in the realm of features and benefits. An example of Beejive’s ease of use is when you trying to share picture or videos with a friend. Beejive sends multimedia via a URL link that your friend can simply click and view on a webpage. They no longer have to accept the file transfer like you would on a program like AOL’s Instant Messenger. This makes it very simple for you because not only does Beejive makes things quick and painless, you don’t have to remember how individual Instant Messaging platforms work and what features are available.
The Beejive chat window works like every other Chat window. You can navigate the active chat window by scrolling up and down using the normal iPad Gestures. With BeejiveIM, the iPad app lists all your chat session on the right hand side of the screen. The user interface provides a bubble preview of what your friends are saying, without you having to switch conversations. If you want to switch conversations from friend to friend, just click the appropriate conversation bubble. The left hand side of the screen serves as the dominant panel, and holds the conversations you are having with your IM friends. What’s nice about the layout is your icon is on side of the screen and your friend is on the other side. What I love is you can configure your friends buddy icon. What I do is take a picture of my close friends (from Facebook, MySpace, or my own photos) and use that as their icon.
Networking and Push Service
What I loved about BeejiveIM is that this iPad App seamlessly transitions from the Wireless and 3G connections. With limits on your monthly bandwidth usage with most iPad data plans, minimizing 3G usage when WIFi is available can prevent overage charges.
BeejiveIM has push alerts that notifies you of new instant messages even in your app is not running. In fact, your iPad can be on standby and BeejiveIM will notify you if you have a message. To save 3G bandwidth while you are out and about, the app allows you to control your notifications.
Features
Like the individual Instant messaging series, BeejiveIM allows you to send pictures, sound, video, and email copies of conversations with a touch of a button. In addition to multimedia, you can send a receive documents in virtually any format that is iPad supported.
Beejive uses your cellular data or wireless connection to send and receive messages. A great feature it has is SMS (i.e. Text message) out support for AIM and Yahoo SMS out. You can’t receive Text messages on your iPad since it’s not a phone, but you can send them out. To make SMS out usage seamless, Beejive integrates with your iPad’s address book.
You can also update your status for everyone to know as Beejive will send that status message to all the accounts you choose. You can also turn yourself “invisible” for th I don’t use them but Beejive does have emoticon supports. For those who don’t know emoticons are, those are the smiley and sad faces you see a lot. For example typing in colon “:”and Right bracket “)”with no spaces will create a happy face J.
Again the whole purpose of BeejiveIM is to manage multiple Instant Messaging Accounts. To help you do that more efficiently, the two features I absolutely love is the ability to merge the multiple IM accounts of your buddy into one meta account and the group chat options.
Crossplatform
What’s nice about BeejiveIM is the app is written for other mobile platforms as well. You will have to pay for another copy, but BeejiveIM can be found on Android Phones, iPhone, and Blackberry.
