Facebook quietly releases desktop chat apps for the workplace

Facebook has soft-launched official desktop chat apps for Mac and PC complete with screen sharing, reports TechCrunch. At the moment, the apps are only available through Facebook’s collaboration software Workplace, which is similar to Slack.

According to TechCrunch, the desktop chat app has a dashboard that collects your conversations and offers text search, as well as sharing options for photos, videos, voice clips, emoji, and GIFs. If you’re quite busy or easily distracted, you can also get notifications that pop up on the desktop so you won’t miss anything (like those all-important cat gifs). The apps also feature screen sharing where a user can at full-screen or just a portion where there’s only a specific app.

“This was one of the most widely requested features by customers, so we built it,” said Workplace by Facebook spokesperson Vanessa Chan, confirming the launch to TechCrunch. “The desktop app is still in beta and being tested by Workplace customers who are providing feedback that we’ll use to improve the product before a wider rollout.”

Anyone can install the beta apps at the moment, which requires Windows 7 and above or macOS 10.9 (Mavericks) to run.

Read the original article on theverge