Speeqe on the iPhone and iPod Touch

We’ve reworked the iPhone theme for Speeqe from the ground up.  We replaced the minimal demo theme with one that supports the more traditional chat style of new text appearing at the bottom.  We also added support for seeing the room roster. There are still several things we’re planning on adding to make chat on the iPhone as easy as possible, so keep watching.

We also added action support – try typing ‘/me jumps up and down’ in a chat.  There were also many bug fixes due to the great feedback from our early testers.  Remember, if you want your own Speeqe room, please let us know; we’re on the lookout for early adopters!

Early Access And New Features

Every few weeks we plan to roll out a few new features to Speeqe, and we have just launched several new things.

Early Access

For those of you wanting to start your own room, please contact us.  We’ll get you set up and you can start using Speeqe immediately.  The only caveat is that Speeqe account creation is not live yet, so room participants must be anonymous or use an already existing Jabber account to log in.  A Gmail account works great.

External rooms work as well.  For example, see the Jabber development room on the Jabber community site.  Just change the URL to point to any public MUC room, and start chatting.

Private Messages

Private room messages are now supported and shown inline with the room chat.  To send a private message you use ‘@’ addressing.  For example, “@jack hi, jack!” will send a private message to the user whose nickname is jack.

Also, Speeqe will ignore private messages to your Jabber or Google Talk account.  This means if you use Google Talk, you can still use Speeqe, and your direct private messages from your Google Talk contacts will still go to your Google Talk client.  Only private room messages will appear in Speeqe.

Unfortunately, due to a bug in Google’s Jabber implementation, this causes the room occupant list not to load.  We’re looking for a solution for this, and we will keep you posted.

Images Are Inlined

If you post a URL ending in “.png” or “.jpg”, the Speeqe site will automatically turn your link into a thumbnail image with a link to the original.  You can also post images by using an HTML tag, but some properties will be ignored to prevent abuse.

You can also post YouTube videos using their HTML snippets, and the videos will appear in the room.

We’ll be working on making these types of features configurable by the room moderators and adding support for more types of URLs for automatic content expansion.

Problem Reporting

If you have any problems with Speeqe rooms, there is now a link at the top right called Submit Log.  Clicking this will ask you for a short description and then sends the client side debugging information to use for analysis.  Please note that this information will include any messages you send, even private ones.  We promise not to make these available publicly or to use the information for any purpose except fixing Speeqe bugs.

Coming Soon

We’re working hard on room logging, room history search, and a revamped version of the iPhone theme.  In the meantime, enjoy the new stuff!

Speeqe Demo Launched

We’ve just launched the Speeqe demo site.  It is a working version of a single room as shown through three themes. Since Speeqe is built on top of the open XMPP standard, you can use any XMPP/Jabber client to connect to the room as well.  Just point them to speeqers@chat.speeqe.com.

We’re working hard on the first version that will let users create their own rooms and expect to have something enw to show in a few weeks.  For now, we’re using Speeqe interally for all company communication so things are improving rapidly.