We are happy to announce that version 1.2.3 of Palringo for the iPhone & iPod Touch has come out of alpha testing, and has now been submitted to Apple for approval. It should be available for you through the App Store in the coming week.

What’s new?

There’s been quite a few changes this time around – the detail of which you can see below. We went through every single suggestion sent to our support team, forums and on the iTunes App Store and added the following new features -

Email notifications

Our server now keeps you connected for up to three hours – and if someone sends you a message, you will get an email with the content, and a link enabling you promptly go back to Palringo. You will also receive an email to notify you when your session expired.

     

Partial Palringo Local support

Palringo Local is not quite ready for the limelight on the iPhone just yet; you can’t yet share your location, however we have added Partial support so you can see where your Palringo contacts are – be it in your contact list, or in a chat group.

New improved themes

We have redesigned the Palringo chat bubbles so they’re now a lot clearer and less in the way of conversations, and we also added an iChat-like theme.

New text entry pad and larger smiley selection panel

We love the new text entry pad – now it expands as you are typing, and we made the smiley panel a lot larger so it’s easier to hit that one smiley. We even threw in another three smileys and a “/me” shortcut. (try typing “/me i love palringo”

Larger thumbnails

You also have the option of saving photos automatically to the camera roll when you send an image from the Camera.

General UI improvements

We’ve generally improved the UI, the most obvious change being the IM service list.

Support for more languages

We now support Japanese, Traditional Chinese, Spanish and German too!

Shameless plug

We’re still looking for translators for the following languages : Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Korean, Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian, Turkish, Ukrainian, if you fancy helping out, just email our friendly support team at support@palringo.com

We still have a limited number of alpha testers slots free, so if you’re interested email us at iphone-alpha@palringo.com with a small blurb about yourself and why you think you’d be a good alpha tester.

Change log since 1.2.2

NEW FEATURES

Major

• Email notifications
• Group administration
• Support for HTTPS proxies
• Support for being invited in an MSN Group Chat
• Support for Spanish, Japanese, Traditional Chinese and German
• New typing pad for text messages
• Tutorial Videos
   

FIXES

Major

• Wrapping of long text messages is now done correctly
• Better handling of long nicknames
• New, more responsive networking code
• Corrected issues with session resuming
• Crashes when leaving Palringo using the ‘Home’ button causing the connection to be lost prematurely
• Crashes when tapping the ‘P’ button after receiving a message from an offline contact (such as the AIM User Agent)
• Optimized handling of unread message notifications
• Palringo now keeps you connected server-side when you get disconnected – even if the iPhone gets disconnected
• Crashes when ‘/me’ is sent by itself in a chat window
• Issues with the keyboard refusing to disappear
• Palringo freezing when taking a picture with the camera, if a message is received at the same time
• Palringo freezing when recording a voice message, if a message is received at the same time

Minor

• Unicode support in status line messages
• Sign in button disappearing after login in incorrectly
• Removed the ability to send blank messages
• Crashes when deleting contacts
• History downloading is more responsive
• Corrected the issue with images disappearing from the chat windows if the iPhone runs out of memory 
• Graphical glitches when searching for a contact, then tapping ‘add contact’
• Faster keyboard handling
• Fixed the display of duplicated contacts
• Fixed issue with the number of unread message badge not being updated properly
• Display problems with picture / voice messages
• Fixed crashes when removing services