Suppose, I don’t know, you suddenly have to make an overnight trip to Philadelphia when you realize the day before your Bahamas vacation that your passport expired. You want to stay connected, though, so you launch the Yahoo! Messenger iPhone app, which keeps you signed in and alerts you to new messages via push, even if you exit the app.
Folks IM you. You tap out your answers. It’s lovely.
You get a few more IMs. You know this because you hear them, as you cruise along the interstate. You’re a smart and safe driver, though, so you don’t text — or IM — while driving.
When you’re safely parked, you glance at the list of IMs and see you have open conversations with a half-dozen people. Too many to navigate the iPhone app expeditiously, so you figure you ought to fire up your Mac and IM them through Adium, as the good lord intended.
It’s at that moment that disaster strikes. The moment you sign in to Yahoo! Messenger anywhere else, the iPhone app signs you out. That makes sense.
What doesn’t make sense, though, is that now you can no longer see any of your conversations. The boneheaded design decision in a nut: You can’t see your chats unless you’re logged in.
That’s painfully frustrating, and renders my desired scenario here completely unworkable. To see those conversations again, you have to sign back in, which forces you to start replying from the iPhone again, which was just what you were trying to avoid.