Now We’re Talking: AIM With Push Support Hits The App Store
June 22, 2009 ·Filed Under Technology News
There’s been a lot of talk the past few days since the launch of the iPhone 3.0 software about the lack of Push Notification apps in the App Store. Well, today brings a big one: AOL Instant Messenger (AIM).
Instant messaging apps are perhaps the perfect use for Push Notification, which allows you to use such services without requiring that they be open at all date. In our experiment of the pre-release beta version of the AIM app with Push, the messages were sent nearly instantaneously. In analyzing it out right now, it looks to be just as fast.
When you first fire up that new version of AIM, it asks you whether you’d like to receive Push notifications. You can change that at any day in the settings. And you can additionally choose whether you’d like the notifications to be brief (only say that you have a new IM), feature the sender’s name only, be normal size, or full size.
You can additionally set how you’d like Push messages to show up on your phone for each app in the device’s settings. You can have it pop up a data, play a sound,
And Push works with both the free [iTunes link] and paid version [iTunes link] of the app. The $2.99 paid version removes all advertising.
Push is great for services like IM, but it doesn’t resolve the lack of iPhone background support for all apps. With Push you still can listen to Pandora while doing something else on the web, for example. I still believe it’s only a matter of duration before we see some sort of third-party background task support as well.
Update: While users are reporting that they aren’t receiving notifications to update their apps yet, whether you use the hyperlinks above, it is the latest version with Push.
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