Some people probably would know that Google Talk is a popular service in business area because many companies adopt Google Cloud Service like Google App Engine as their business solution. For iOS platform, I was surprised that there is no official Google Talk Client App. Even in Google I/O 2013, Google claimed and released Hangouts to integrate Google Talk. The operation concept is still far away from my cognition. For example, you can't recognize which user is online or which user is offline in Google Hangouts for iOS. There is even no traditional contact list in it.
Since it's been a long time that I didn't develop any my own app after I was employed by a company, I decided to develop a Google Talk Client App to meet my need. Basically my requirement is that the App has to be light, straightforward and able to receive messages in background. Therefore, Mercurius is born according to these criteria.
Mercurius only has two views for different purpose. One is for roster list and another is for conversation. I try to avoiding to push different view pages just in order to access a certain feature. So most operations can be done in the root view which is also a roster list.
As to change profile pictures, change status or subscribe a new contact into list, just swipe to move the roster view and click the menu behind the roster view directly. In consideration of account security, Mercurius also adopts OAuth 2.0 as a way of authentication. The advantage of OAuth is that Mercurius doesn't memorize user's name and password. As some people might know, some services they store username/password in their server. Usually this kind of app would ask you to create an extra account through their activation process. Because gmail account is very important to me in many ways, I am extremely reluctant to let other services to get my username/password.
Mercurius has been on App Store and it's free now. If you are using Google Talk and also an iPhone/iPad, maybe give it a try. Cheers!!
https://itunes.apple.com/app/mercurius/id642557738?mt=8
