As we predicted, Chat Heads are coming to a jailbroken iPhone near you. Stride developer, Adam Bell, is currently hard at work on implementing Facebook’s Chat Head feature system-wide on iOS, and he’s made some great progress.
First posted on the Verge, Bell’s Chat Head integration with iOS looks to be coming along much faster than many anticipated. Take a look at a hands-on video inside.
Per The Verge:
Chat Heads inhabit a separate layer inside the Facebook app, so it was just a matter of finding that layer and making the rest of the app transparent. “The hardest part was getting this all to render on top of everything else,” Bell says, which means Facebook is always running on your phone.
Even though the Facebook app will be “always running” as a transparent layer, apparently this will have minimal impact on battery life. One thing that Bell’s implementation of Chat Heads can’t do, is integrate with SMS messages like it can on Android. Given the fast turnaround time with this project, though, I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of that happening in the future.
Chat Heads for iOS should be available in a few days once all of the bugs are worked out. It will be a free jailbreak tweak on Cydia. What do you think?
