Stay Connected With All Of Your Friends With Chattr
Chattr - All in one messenger (GTalk, Facebook, AIM and Yahoo!) ($1.99) by Whitewater Labs, LLC is a chat client that lets you have meaningful conversations between Facebook, AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), Google Talk and Yahoo! Messenger, all at the same time. If you thought you were socially connected before, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
The app is simple to use. Just log into your chat accounts and start socializing. Once you’ve entered your username and password, everyone one on your Facebook, AIM, GTalk and Yahoo! Messenger chat accounts will appear. You can view each account separately to see who is online that you want to start a conversation with.
As chat clients go, it is pretty much the same as the others. The user interface is nicely designed and the chat windows look good. If you miss a chat from someone, their name will have an exclamation point next to it on the list so you will know to select their name and see what they said. The app is set up to automatically run in the background so that, even if you are not actively using it, you will receive a notification that someone is talking to you.
If you are chatting with another friend that is also using Chattr, you can initiate a voice conversation from within the app that will not count against your phone’s minutes.
There are a couple of annoying things about Chattr. For example, when you miss a chat, a number will appear next to the account it came from (Facebook, AIM, etc.). If you want to see the chat that you missed, the person still has to be online for you to access it. I left Chattr on overnight and a friend sent me a message before I was up the next morning. So, when I opened the app, I wanted to see what he had said, but because he was no longer online, I couldn’t read the message until he came back online again. In the meantime, that number stays next to the account the entire time, which is very irritating for those of us that like to have a tidy chat window.
As multiple-client chat apps go, this is a reasonably good one. Users can only chat between four accounts, but it is only $1.99, so if you only use Facebook, AIM, GTalk or Yahoo! Messenger for your social interaction, this is perfect. You won’t have to pay a premium price for accounts that you don’t even have. Pick it up in the App Store and start chatting away.
