Facebook launched an experimental new app today that aims to make it easier to message friends and family from your wrist while stuck inside during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The new app, called Kit, short for “Keep in touch”, only works on Apple Watch. Kit can be used to send voice messages, your location, emoji and more all with just a few quick taps.
Valve now offers a standalone Steam Chat app for Android and iOS.
The free download lets gamers stay in touch with friends on the move. It boasts all the messaging features you’re used to in Steam, including group chat, customizable notifications, and more. But one thing’s missing.
Steam is taking the fight to Discord with a new Chat service that makes it easier to communicate with teammates.
Chat can be used for voice and text, negating the need for third-party services, and it’s (obviously) designed with gamers in mind. It’s also headed to iOS soon.
Snapchat has promised to make changes to its app after a Change.org petition attracted more than 1.2 million signatures from disgruntled users.
Snap has endured growing backlash from fans following a controversial redesign, with many calling for the company to revert to its old user interface. Now the company says it is planning adjustments to the Friends and Discover sections.
The popular messaging platform Slack is ready to go from text-only to providing voice calls for teams that use the service to communicate.
Starting today, paying teams using the iOS, Mac and Chrome apps will be able to make group calls, giving you one less reason to keep Skype installed on your Mac.
WhatsApp is a pretty popular messaging app that went from 200 million daily active users in April of 2013 to 800 million of them as of April 2015.
Unlike competitor SnapChat, however, WhatsApp will save every photo and video file sent to you to your Camera Roll. This could make for some embarrassing moments when you’re swiping through your photos to show mom your latest cat pictures.
It could also start to clog up your iPhone, really, with all that racy video your friends keep sending you.
To avoid these situations, you can disable the “feature.” Here’s how.
There are a dozen-odd ways to chat with people these days, from IM to Twitter direct messages to apps like Slack, Snapchat and GroupMe.
If you want to create your own with no more fuss than typing in a unique URL in your web browser, though, you can’t go wrong with hack.chat, a new, bare-bones, no-frills approach to private chat that looks like something out of the DOS era. And I mean that in a good way.
It’s dead simple to use (though you can also run your own server) and incredibly disposable. Perfect for those quick chats you need to make happen that you may not want on something like Slack, which keeps an archive of all the inappropriate comments you’ve ever written.
SAN FRANCISCO — Sébastien Leidgens wants to put a new angle on the business card.
His invention, Cubr, is a six-sided die that connects people through private mobile web chat. When a red, blue or green Cubr is tossed your way, you hit the website or download the app, then enter the code to start your instant message convo or share photos with the person who gave you the die. The enterprising Belgian, a former project manager at a digital marketing agency, is taking a gamble on the idea that people are tired of handing out one-dimensional cards.
“It’s a business card for non-business people,” Leidgens says in an English heavily influenced by his native French. “Young people don’t have business cards. This you can use for private situations in everyday life. It’s a lot more fun and outside of the usual public circles.”
Chatting on Facebook has become rather de rigueur for many of us these days, as the social networking giant makes it easier and easier to stay in touch via its blue and white website and dedicated mobile apps.
If you’re anything like me, chances are that your buddies chat you up as often on Facebook Messenger as they do on iMessage. This multiple platform chatting solution is all fine and dandy when you’re just dealing with your friends, but what about the boss? Your mother in law? That friend who is trolling your Facebook page to see why you’re not at her party?
You need a way to hide the fact that you’re online and chatting from these folks, and we’re going to tell you how.
After finally getting BBM on your iPhone this week, you may have upgraded to iOS 7.0.3 to find it no longer works properly. One of the fonts BlackBerry uses in its app is no longer supported by Apple, causing the app to crash when you open existing chats. But there is a way around it.
Mobile app, Twine, is trying to do something new in the dating app space. Unlike other dating or random chatting apps like ChatRoulette, Tinder, or OK Cupid, Twine connects you with new people around you and lets you chat and flirt with them without revealing your identity until you decide to.
That’s kind of a big deal, especially for those who find themselves overwhelmed with overly assertive individuals on many online and app-based dating services. Twine also tries to keep things gender balanced, saying that it only allows in equal numbers of each gender (it only recognizes two), so that’s why some folks may be put on a waiting list when they join.
Popular group messaging service, HipChat, announced today that its Mac app is finally out of beta and ready for primetime. The good news doesn’t stop just there, though, as the HipChat iOS app has been completely redesigned too.
Both HipChat 2.0 for Mac and HipChat 2.0 for iOS are available now for free. HipChat for Mac finally runs natively on the Mac rather than being powered by AIR, and new features include better performance, vertical tabs, Retina support, Notification Center alerts, and more.
Here are the release notes on the iOS app:
T-Mobile U.K. has confirmed that BlackBerry Messenger for Android and iOS will arrive on June 27. That means we have exactly three weeks to wait until BlackBerry’s hugely popular chat service goes cross-platform, and you can see exactly what it will look like on Android in the photo above.
Skype has today updated its iOS app to make it super easy to switch to a Bluetooth headset or speaker during a call. It also makes one-to-one chats appear in the correct order, makes some bug fixes and improvements, and more.
I have a confession to make: I own a BlackBerry Z10, and I love it. I think its BlackBerry 10 operating system is terrific — it’ll be even better when it gets more apps — and I haven’t been this excited about a new platform since I got my first iPhone. Seriously.
I certainly don’t want to see BlackBerry sinking anytime soon, then.
But I can’t help but wonder whether BlackBerry might have just shot itself in the foot by announcing BlackBerry Messenger for Android and iOS.
Google Babel, the new communication service from Google, has been renamed Google Hangouts ahead of its public debut at Google I/O next week, according to an unnamed Google employee. Babel had been its name internally throughout the service’s development, but that moniker has now been dropped by Google.
Babel, a new chat service rumored to be on its way from Google, has been shown off in a bunch of leaked screenshots ahead of its official unveiling. The images reportedly come from a Google employee, and they show Babel running on a desktop. Not only do they confirm the service’s name, but also a number of its features.
I’ve been a Viber user for sometime now, but I’ve always been frustrated with its lack of support for group messaging — something I believe every messaging app should do from day one. Thankfully, this is one of the features introduced in Viber’s latest update, available on Android and iOS today.
SeedCode has announced a new and very impressive template/add-on for FileMaker Pro 12 and FileMaker Go that let’s FileMaker developers build real-time instant message style chats into FileMaker database systems. The new template, dubbed FMChat is built entirely using FileMaker 12, which means that no additional backend system is needed to use it.
FMChat is particularly impressive in that it allows chat participants to interact with each other and with database content. It’s even designed with automation in mind. Chat sessions can be used to trigger scripts and automated actions. Potential actions appear as links in the chat transcript. The template can be used in a number of different ways but some examples include approving purchase orders, accepting event invitations, and closing help desk cases.
Got a new Mac? You’ve probably realised that OS X provides an excellent out-of-the-box experience. Unlike with Windows, few add-ons are required. There’s a great browser, for example, and full PDF support. But there’s still some tools that most experienced Mac users download the minute they boot-up a new Mac. Here they are, listed for possibly the first time…
While we patiently await the release of Skype for iPad, which was supposed to land last Tuesday, the Skype application for Mac just got a fancy new update that introduces background video calling and group video chat.
We’ve been raving about Apple’s new iMessage feature in iOS 5 all week. If our current findings haven’t piqued your interest in the new messaging service that let’s you ditch SMS messaging, then maybe this little tidbit will intrigue you. With iMessage, Apple is also introducing the best mobile group chat client to ever hit a smartphone.
Steve Jobs can’t stop porn on Apple devices, but low FaceTime adoption can, apparently.
We’ve been following the rise of FaceTime adult chat company iP4Play since it launched in August 2010.
Now Cult of Mac has learned the company is bust: operations officially ceased last week.
iP4Play blames slow adoption of FaceTime, Apple’s videoconferencing technology, rather than any failings of the company. Not enough people are using FaceTime, whether for sex chat or anything else, the company’s CEO says.
The best multi-IM client on the Mac got a meaty update over the weekend and now at version 1.4, Adium is quacking louder and prouder than ever before.
The biggest new feature in Adium 1.4 is Twitter support. I have to say, having played around with it, it’s not about to replace YoruFokurou as my go-to Twitter client. Like IRC support for it before it, Adium’s trying to shoehorn functionality in that doesn’t really fit. Adium’s Twitter implementation simply crams your timeline of Tweets into an always-open IM window, like a big group chat. That might work for some with more manageable Twitter contact lists, but for me, I quickly turned off Adium’s Twitter support.
There’s more to the new Adium than Twitter support too. It also gains full IRC support, improved group chat, bookmarks for persistent chats and many other tweaks and fixes. You’ll need OS X 10.5.8 or greater, and the new version is roughly a 25MB download.
Yahoo Messenger is a popular chat client with millions of users. It is available on most popular desktop and mobile platforms. So this week when I read fellow Cultist, Eli Milchman’s, news post about the big app upgrade that brought video calling over 3G or Wi-Fi I was excited about trying it out. However, that excitement quickly died off after Eli and I started to test it out. Needless to say today there is one less Yahoo Messenger user than there was before.
That user is me and you can find out why by reading the rest of my review.
