WhatsApp Comes To The Desktop

Are you one of the 600 million people on WhatsApp? Do you grow tired of having to type all of your messages through your phone? Good news!

There’s now a desktop version.

It’s a web app rather than a native client — and for now, at least, it seems to only play friendly with Google Chrome.

But if you’re ready to dive in, you can find the new web-ready version of WhatsApp right over here…

One weird catch: to log in on the desktop, you have to take a picture of a QR code through WhatsApp on your phone. This is necessary, presumably, because WhatsApp uses your phone number and SMS verifications rather than usernames/passwords. This currently works on Android, Windows Phone, and BlackBerry… but “due to Apple platform limitations” (WhatsApp’s words, there — we’re not sure what limitations they mean), iOS users are left out in the cold.

On the platforms where it works, however, it’s very slick.

Curiously, it seems as if it’s using your phone for more than just the initial login; note the orange warning in the screenshot below. If your phone dies, so does your WhatsApp web connection.
jorn

Comments

How To Hide Text In Microsoft Word 2007, Reveal It & Protect It

Sometimes what we hide is more important than what we reveal. Especially, documents with sensitive information, some things are supposed to be ‘for some eyes only’. Such scenarios are quite common, even for the more un-secretive among us. You want to show someone a letter composed in MS Word, but want to keep some of the content private; or it’s an official letter with some part of it having critical data. As important as these two are, the most common use could involve a normal printing job. Many a time we have to print different versions of a document, one copy for one set of eyes and others for other sets. Rather than creating multiple copies and therefore multiple printing jobs, what if we could just do it from the same document? That too, without the hassle of repeated cut and paste. We can, with a simple feature in MS Word – it’s just called Hidden and let me show you how to use it to hide text in Microsoft Word 2007. It’s a simple single click process. Open the document

Clip & Convert Your Video Faster With Quicktime X & The New Handbrake 64-bit [Mac]

Recently a friend of mine asked for my help to find a video of a good presentation to be shown to one of his classes. He also requested for it to be iPod friendly as he would also distribute the video to his students. Three things came to my mind: Steve Jobs, Quicktime and Handbrake . Mr. Jobs is well known for his great presentations which are often used as references. I have several Apple Keynotes videos. For my friend, I decided to choose the one that introduced MacBook Air – the one that never fails to deliver the wow effect to the non-techie audience. It’s a part of January 2008 Macworld Keynote. First step: The Cutting To get only a specific part of the Keynote, I clipped the 1+ hour video into about 20 minutes using Quicktime X (which comes with Snow Leopard). I opened the movie using Quicktime X and chose Trim from the Edit menu ( Command + T ). Then I chose the start and end of my clip by moving both edges of the trimming bar to the desired position. To increase th

Ex-Skypers Launch Virtual Whiteboard Deekit

Although seriously long in the tooth and being disrupted by a plethora of startups, for many years Skype has existed as an almost ubiquitous app in any remote team’s toolkit. So it seems apt that a new startup founded by a team of ex-Skype employees is set to tackle another aspect of online collaboration. Deekit, which exits private beta today, is a virtual and collaborative whiteboard to help remote teams work smarter. The Tallinn, Estonia-based startup is headed up by founder and CEO, Kaili Kleemeier, who was previously a Head of Operations at Skype. She and three colleagues quit the Internet calling giant in 2012 and spent a year researching ideas in the remote team space. They ended up focusing on creating a new virtual whiteboard, born out of Kleemeier’s experience collaborating with technical teams remotely, specifically helping Skype deal with incident management. “Working with remote teams has been a challenge in many ways – cultural differences, language differences, a

Kiran Upadhyay

Search This Blog