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May 13

First Look: BeeJive Offers Best IM for iPad Yet

Posted in: Apple, apps, ipad, Media Players, Today's Chili

The iPad’s lack of multitasking support makes it a crummy chat tool. While playing a game or reading a comic, for example, it’s frustrating being bombarded by a flurry of push notifications about instant messages screaming for your attention.

Fortunately, while we wait for Apple to release iPhone OS 4, which introduces the ability to run multiple apps in the background, we’ll at least have one awesome IM app for the iPad: BeeJive IM.

BeeJive was an extremely popular IM app for the iPhone, and rightly so. It’s a premium app that combines gorgeous visuals with an intuitive user interface. BeeJive has nailed it again with its iPad app, which was submitted to the App Store on Wednesday (so if it’s approved, expect it to launch in the next week). Wired.com received a near-final build of the app to give you a sneak peek.

(Note: The screengrabs would look a lot better had I not omitted the screennames, but I did so to respect my friends’ privacy.)

BeeJive IM supports multiple IM services, including AIM, Google Chat, Facebook chat and many others. The setup process is quick: hit the honeycomb icon and begin adding accounts. You can change the chat wallpaper by clicking on the gear-shaped icon if you’d like. From there on, you’re ready to chat.

My favorite part about the BeeJive UI is it lists your chat sessions in a column on the right side of the screen. You can see a preview of what a person is saying in a bubble, which eliminates the need to switch back and forth between chats over and over. Selecting a chat in the right window displays the full conversation in the center screen.

You can scroll up and down the active chat window in the center, and there are icons to send an image, record and send a voice clip, e-mail a copy of your conversation and close the chat. I was surprised by how painless sending a photo and audio clip was: Rather than require a friend to accept a file transfer, BeeJive sends multimedia in the form of a URL for the recipient to view on a webpage. It’s fast, fast, fast, which is how the overall iPad experience should be.

The app looks best in landscape mode, where your buddy list is displayed by default to the left of your chat window, but in portrait mode the app still works great. In portrait mode, the chat takes up most of the screen, and you can view your buddy list by tapping the upper left icon.

Like the iPhone version, BeeJive supports push IMs, meaning you can stay online constantly if you’d like, even when the iPad is asleep. Pushed messages pop up in the same manner as text messages.

I’ve been a big fan of BeeJive for quite some time. The company doesn’t rush to be first, but instead takes its time to get the app just right before release. The iPad version of BeeJive is a worthy successor to the iPhone version; in many ways, it’s even better.

Of course, as well designed as BeeJive may be, it doesn’t compensate for the iPad’s inability to multitask. Apple has said iPhone OS 4 will be available for the iPad this fall, so hopefully the future addition of multitasking will make the general experience of chatting feel less disruptive.

BeeJive will cost $6 when it hits the App Store for a limited time. The app will cost $10 later. BeeJive for iPad is a standalone app, meaning the iPhone and iPad versions will be sold separately.

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