Facebook Messenger is now Available as a Desktop App

Facebook Messenger is now Available as a Desktop App

All Posts, Facebook, Social Media

I was going through some emails and came across a press release from F8 where they demo Messenger as a desktop app and that made me smile. So before I get into my view on this, you can go ahead and download it free on the Mac App Store as well as the Microsoft App Store. Both are free!


(Image and article source)

Now for me I use Facebook a little different. While Facebook has a BUNCH of different apps, I preferred it when they had all of the functions under one app. I imagine it was easier to maintain them as separate installs, but for me I hate having to switch apps to perform a function that I used to do while inside of one experience already. Additionally I don’t like having Messenger on my iPhone and resorted to using it on my iPad and through my browser as my main interaction point. Having it as a stand alone app on my laptop though saves me from using the additional device, but also keeps the Messenger experience to my main device; being my laptop. I use Messenger almost exclusively for business interactions so I like to keep my time of use of it to normal working hours, then close it and not get notifications or distractions from it until I’m ready to. Similar to how I treat emails during the day too by only opening my email app a few times a day and not having it open all day to distract me of every email of the many inboxes I manage. But I digress.

So check out the desktop offering and let me know what you think! Will you use it more or less than the mobile apps or through your browser?

 

App Review: Photo+

All Posts, Photography, Product Reviews

We received an email from our friends at Wallpaper Wizard for a special deal on a new Mac OSX app called Photo+ from ArcSoft. If you do photography like we do, chances are you have quite a few applications that all do certain things very well. If on a Mac, you’re probably used to using the default Preview app. While great for single images, viewing multiple images in full, zooming, cropping, and such are a bit cumbersome and limited. With Photo+ however there are a host of great features to make showcasing a whole folder of images really easy and fast to display.

Photo+ (screenshot1)

Using your track pad or Magic Mouse you can easily slide left and right or hover over images to view them. Full images within large folders open quickly. As you can see you have plenty of controls to use to:

  • Easily start a slideshow
  • Navigate images
  • Delete images
  • Share to social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr
  • Make photos favorites
  • Zoom
  • And my favorite is entering full screen while still being able to scroll and navigate images

Photo+ Screenshot 2

As you can see from this screenshot, you can easily crop out and copy to your clipboard, or save the image quickly.

Photo Plus (3)

Well take advantage of their Mac App Store introductory sale from $9.99 to .99Cents. Within a few seconds of purchasing it was downloaded and I was up and running with no fuss. Arcsoft does have some well documented tutorials should you need them, but looking at the icons they’re all pretty familiar if you already use most other photo editing programs.