BeejiveIM 2.1.0 Includes Support for Facebook IM, Ability to Customize Background & Anti-Piracy Measures

Folks at Beejive recently released a new version of their awesome Instant Messaging app BeejiveIM which is one of our favorite iPhone apps. You can read our review of the iPhone app here.

The new version of BeejiveIM (2.1.0) includes support for Facebook IM, ability to customize the background wallpaper within the iPhone app and anti-piracy measures to fight piracy of their iPhone app after Crackulous was released; a jailbreak app which strips copy protection from iPhone apps and render them free for distribution.

The new version of BeejiveIM includes:

• Support for Facebook IM, including the ability to login from multiple locations, update your buddy picture and update your Facebook status.
• Wallpaper selection inside the application. Ability to select your own wallpaper.
• Performance enhancements.
• Small UI enhancements.

So BeejiveIM which already worked with multiple IM networks such as AIM/iChat/MobileMe, MSN/Windows Live, Yahoo!, MySpace, GoogleTalk, ICQ, & Jabber, now also supports Facebook IM.

BeejiveIM 2.1.0 also allows you to customize the background wallpaper within the iPhone app. Simply tap “More” and then “Set Wallpaper” to bring up the selection of wallpapers. You also have the option to select a photo from your iPhone's camera roll or take a picture and set it as the background wallpaper for the app.

They have also implemented an anti-piracy measure to fight piracy of their iPhone app. They informed Mobilecrunch:

"We have recently implemented new anti-piracy measures in BeejiveIM for iPhone. We have tried to keep our approach fun with an error message and a video. But we hope our message is clear: please respect the work of developers."

So if users are using a cracked version of BeejiveIM; they will get the following error:

Here is some background about the error from Greg Kumparak of Mobilecrunch:

Beejive nearly always makes references to the movie Office Space in their promotional iPhone screenshots, generally using character names as screen name placeholders. The “PC Load Letter” message continues this tradition - it’s the error message that the office printer displays up until it meets its end at the business end of a baseball bat.

Here is the YouTube link to the video.

Its interesting to see iPhone developers taking matters in their own hands to fight piracy of their iPhone apps, developer of iPhone app, Full-Screen Web Browser had also figured out a way to turn cracked versions of his iPhone app into demos.

As we have mentioned before, BeejiveIM which costs $15.99 is pricey but it is an awesome instant messaging client for the iPhone. It is also one of the most polished iPhone apps that I have used. If you are an IM addict then it is definitely worth the high price especially since Push Notification service finally introduced in iPhone firmware 3.0 will address one of the major drawbacks of the iPhone app (though it was due to limitations of the iPhone SDK) where it cannot be run in the background currently.

You can download BeejiveIM using this direct iTunes link.

As always, please don't forget to drop us a line to give us your feedback on the latest version of BeejiveIM.