no sleep for you!

For once, I'm not talking about my own lack of sleep. I'm talking about my iPhone...

I am in the process of writing a native jabber client for the iPhone. I use jabber for work, and it's about the only thing that keeps me from using the iPhone instead of my MacBook Pro for walkaround communications.

It turns out the the iPhone SDK is pretty darned good. It didn't take a great deal of effort to get it installed, provision my iPhone as a development device, and load working code onto my own phone. But there is a problem.

The SDK doesn't allow me to background tasks.

This means that I can only use my iPhone as a jabber client if I'm actively using the client software. If the phone goes to sleep, or I get an SMS message, or a phone call, the jabber client turns off.

I find this limitation annoying, and it's probably the reason no one else has developed a native IM client to date.

developing for the iPhone

It's been awhile since I've written anything complicated. The last bit of real programming I did was to write a test tool for exercising windows applications through Win32 API calls rather than normal screen positioning and click events.. it was a pretty slick piece of work, but there are 3rd party apps available now that are much better than what I wrote, and I've finally reached the point in my career where it is generally more cost effective to buy rather than write.

That might be a topic for another article.. the progression of software aquiry practice along the career path of the technologist.

Anyway, I've had the iPhone 3G for a bit now, and the only thing that I find it lacking (other than cut & paste...) is a native jabber client.

My workplace uses jabber for internal communications. The jabber server is local to our LAN and inaccessible to the outside world. This is good practice for security. None of our data leak out accidentally this way. However, it means that I can't use a webapp for IM to get to my internal jabber server without some tricky tunneling, and those types of tunnels kinda defeat the purpose of securing the jabber box in the first place.

So, I decided I'd have to write something myself again.

The iPhone developer program is really pretty slick. There are hours of video intros and the tools look pretty easy to use. I suppose I'll see how easy in the coming weeks as I try to get this thing off the ground.

iPhone 3G

It's the bees knees.