Chat Heads for iOS arriving with upcoming tweak

With the recent debut of Facebook Home, as well as the Facebook 6.0 iPhone app, Chat Heads has been a hot topic in the tech community. Now, according to a report from The Verge, a developer by the name of Adam Bell has created a tweak that will allow you to use Chat Heads in iOS.

For those that don’t know, Chat Heads is a system-wide component of Android that allows you to access your Facebook conversations everywhere, no matter what you are doing. Shown in the picture above, Chat Heads represents all of your open conversations with a circle that sits on the edge of the screen. To begin a chat, you simply tap on the circle to open the conversation.

The development of this tweak was made much easier by Facebook’s recent addition of Chat Heads to their iOS app. Instead of writing his own code for the tweak, Bell tricked Facebook’s app into drawing Chat Heads outside of the app’s layer.

The trick, according to Bell, was isolating the Facebook app from the Chat Heads living inside it. 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. Apparently, Bell’s tweak doesn’t take much of a toll on battery life. ”It doesn’t seem very resource intensive,” he says. “Only when you move the Chat Head is it actually doing anything.”

The tweak isn’t bug free yet, and reportedly freezes occasionally, but that’s the reason that it isn’t available yet for public release. By the time the hack is available on Cydia, Bell hopes to have all the kinks worked out. Considering the progress that has been made in just a few hours, it likely won’t be long before we see the release of this awesome tweak, so stay tuned for more news regarding it.

Edit: Facebook user Tyler points out that Chat Heads is available for all Android phones, not just those with Home