So, now that you have push, are you struggling with what to do when you are signed in from your phone as well as your desktop? I tend to use a different screenname on my iPhone then I do for my desktop. This bleeds over from my sidekick years - I am a very heavy mobile IMer as a result of those years. However, I do use the same screenname from both locations time to time. Since AIM for iPhone supports switching screennames, I find this easy to manage and use. (To switch which account you are using, go to the My Info tab and hit the Sign Out button in the upper right corner. This will take you to the accounts management screen where you can add another account.)
But if you'd prefer to use the same screenname on your desktop and your iPhone, you'll need to know a little bit about how AIM routes messages. The way IM routing works when you are signed into multiple locations is simple - all IMs go to every instance, unless you set your status to Away at a particular location, then that location does not receive any IMs. For example, say you are signed into both AIM for Mac as well as iChat with the same screenname. Normally, any message you receive will get delivered to both AIM and iChat. But if you set yourself Away in iChat, then IMs you receive will be delivered to AIM but not to iChat. This means that if you set yourself to Away on your iPhone and you are signed into another location you will stop receiving IMs as well as push notifications on your iPhone. Note - if you are only signed into one location, even if your status is Away, you'll still get IMs and push notifications at that location.
That's how it's supposed to work.
Unfortunately, right now we have a bug, and this does not work for the iPhone AIM clients. We are working to resolve this issue and hope to have it fixed soon. Hopefully it will be a fix we can make in the network and it won't require you to download an updated app. I'll keep you posted. Also, we are looking for ways to update how we do IM routing and are open to suggestions, so if you have ideas, let us know.
Some of the ideas we're experimenting with include:
- doing what we did for SMS notifications and adding a pref so you can choose to only receive the first push notification from each screenname that sends you an IM
- changing the logic so that we stop sending push notifications the moment you respond from a different client. The problem here is knowing when to start sending notifications back to the phone. Say you walk away from your computer and the person you were IMing with kept IMing you. At what point should we start sending you push notifications again? We have even gotten crazy and thought about using bluetooth detection ;-)
As you can see, it isn't that straight forward, but we are working on it and would love to hear your ideas.
Since I brought up being signed into multiple locations, this might be a good time to talk about AOLSystemMsg. Do you remember how you used to get a message from that screenname when you signed in from multiple locations? That still happens except for in two cases. The first case is when you are signed into two instances from the same IP address. For example, if you sign into iChat and AIM for Mac on the same computer you will not receive the message. Recently, we've also turned this off for products using Open AIM - see http://dev.aol.com/aim for more information. If your second session is an application based on Open AIM, like AIM for iPhone, you will not get this message. We are making some enhancements so that we can offer you that information back in the iPhone AIM client, so keep an eye out for that, too.
I hope that helps describe how to best use AIM when you're logged in from more than one place. We're continuously making improvements and listening to your feedback, so please keep it coming.
