This time I’ve to say: PRAISE Apples review team! Expedited Review was granted and Rooms already got through the successful review and it should be in the app store in some minutes!

What now?

The bad news first:

The reason for the expedited review/update request was a crash of Rooms right from the start,  after updating the iPhone/iPod to iOS 4.0. This was because of a feature you all liked alot and which I will really miss, now I had to remove it.

Apple already requested to remove this some time ago, because it’s using undocumented API calls and so is against the rules. And I must admit, they we’re right to ask me to remove it, now I saw the results in these crashes :-/

It’s the ‘stay online’ feature which could be switched on in the settings. This tried to hold your connection to the server although you’ve locked your device and shut of the screen.

Because of some of this code which is checked right on the start of the app, the whole app now failes to run.

I’m really sorry to say, that now your devices will just disconnect when you lock your screen or when you close the app – UNLESS you can use multitasking on your device… read on for more infos.

The good news (at least for some users):

Now the update is approved, you will be able to stay online though, using the multitasking features of iOS4 – which is sadly only available for iPhone 3Gs and iPhone 4.

This will let Rooms run even in the background actively for some minutes if you’ve closed the app! When this time is over it will just disconnect, give you a hint and though will stay in the background for fast switching back to it.

What more?

But for sure after such a long time there are more features to come with this update

So here you go with the current update description for version 1.4:

-= iPad =-

Rooms for iPhone is now UNIVERSAL and so can run in all its glory on iPad too!

However, there’s an iPad only version of Rooms coming too – with many new features taking advantage of the iPads bigger screen.

So you can decide for yourself if it’s worth buying the iPad only version too.

-= Multitasking =-

Using an iPhone 3Gs or the new iPhone 4 you can now use the advantage of iOS4 Multitasking!

Whenever you need to use another application, just press the Home Button and leave Rooms while staying connected for a while in the background.

-= Some more handy features =-

The Chatroom quick-switch (double tap the chat room) was completely rewritten with some new features like:

• marking all badge infos as read
• direct access to the room informations
• sorting the chat rooms
• display the last chat text for every room entry

The room order handling was completely rewritten to let the user decide how quickly a room can be accessed by swipe/quick-switch

Rooms should now reliably save the current open chat room and get this one active again on restart/reconnect

-= And much more · Changelog =-

• prevent the clear button in the chat input from acting fast – ask first
• display color in the quit/leave message
• channel password handling/keychain completely rewritten
• added “/ame” & “/amsg” commands for messaging all open chat rooms
• added /itunes command to the shortcuts with some nice output (which uses a new /nowplaying command + media tags, so own formats are possible too)
• let the title labels in the main navigation bar use more space if available
• parse ZNC timestamps in log buffer msgs and use them for the themes timestamp instead > nicer backlog output
• added some code for media upload management for enabling this in the near future – this needs some more work on server side
• some more changes on the codebase for sure – so it’s more stable than ever … again

• Changed: the autojoin switch can now be find within the chat room informations
• Changed: the chat room encoding selector can now be find within the chat room informations
• Changed: made some UI/usability changes to the Rooms Browser
• Changed: updated Chat Core to rev 4998

• Fixed: iOS 4 compatibility
• Fixed: sometimes private chans could not be closed
• Fixed: problems with connections which were nearly the same (for example using ZNC with 2 connections using just different usernames)
• Fixed: now reconnects on losing connection (for example when switching from 3G to Wifi or vice versa)
• Fixed: channel link detection in chat failed sometimes

• Removed: The ‘Stay Online’ feature had to be removed for compatibility purpose. Sorry! (iOS4 will though mostly make up for this)