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Cross-platform Silverlight out-of-browser Facebook client finally launches
And boy was it worth the wait.
I won't bore you with a laborious review with lots of screenshots -- Think Different has pictures, if you want -- I'll just tell you that this thing works, and it works really well. It's black and swish and shiny and silver. The entire gamut of Facebook functionality has been brought over to the Silverlight client. Status updates, photo browsing, mail -- even a neat photo uploader tool.
Plus it has notifications, ala TweetDeck or Growl. You can just forget most of the apps I listed in last week's Five Facebook Desktop Apps feature -- this bad boy does it all.
Except chat. It doesn't frackin' do chat. Anyway, give it a go -- you'll need to install the new version developer version of Silverlight, but it's worth it, I promise. Microsoft Silverlight > Adobe Air?!
Comments
21
Subscribe to commentsMichaelJan 26th 2010 8:48AM
Looks like they took some hints from the Zune UI....I like it.
Kevin WellsJan 26th 2010 9:26AM
anyone using facebook chat is a noob and shouldn't be reading this site anyway, since it would obviously be above their technical level.
Sebastian AnthonyJan 26th 2010 9:45AM
*puts on his troll-resistant armor, unsheathes his sword* Back! Go back to the bridge from whence you came!
Kevin WellsJan 26th 2010 10:14AM
just sayin', who needs another terrible facebook chat client when you have pidgin, digsby, trillian, etc? the one built-in to facebook.com is useful approximately 0% of the time. it demands focus whenever you receive a message, it does not accurately tell you when people are online, and stops working randomly.
richard.gaileyJan 26th 2010 9:36AM
I like the look and feel of it, but whilst I was writing a long reply to a message that I had received in my inbox, the window went completely white and didn't recover. But I guess it has it's early stage glitches, as it's an early beta.
Still, I'm going to continue playing with it.
Sebastian AnthonyJan 26th 2010 9:46AM
Doh... I didn't have it crash on me yet! But yeah, it's a Beta version of the client _and_ an early version of Silverlight 4. Gonna have some bugs I'm sure :)
LaLoJan 26th 2010 9:33AM
Looks sweet
richard.gaileyJan 26th 2010 10:00AM
It seems pretty quick as well, and a very small footprint to boot.
I take it that it was built using HTML5?
Jason DashJan 26th 2010 6:27PM
Uh... no. It's built on Silverlight... just like ot says all over the article xD
Plus, I severly doubt HTML 5 will be able to achieve anything similar, especially in terms or speed and animations due to a) uncompiled code and b) it lacks a dedicated animation framework like Silverlight.
depJan 26th 2010 10:42AM
Scrolling is a pain.. But it looks nice.
Sebastian AnthonyJan 26th 2010 11:09AM
Yeah, 'funky' scrollbars. Mouse scroll-wheel seems to work on some of the panels though.
iGateJan 26th 2010 10:52AM
is it better than fishbowl?
iGateJan 26th 2010 10:53AM
i forgot, momentarily, that i'm on a mac so the above question no longer matters to me :D
DeoWulfJan 26th 2010 10:14PM
I believe it works on Mac as well...
sRcJan 26th 2010 2:26PM
trying this out now, it is pretty awesome
verhasseltsamueljJan 26th 2010 9:27PM
After installing the desktop client, I could no longer use my inbox in Firefox or view any photo albums. I then disabled the Silverlight plug-in and restarted my browser and everything was fine.
Any ideas on what happened?
jabapyth+dlsJan 26th 2010 11:05PM
Umm "cross-platform" "silverlight"? Isn't that something of an oxymoron? Or does it play nice w/ moonlight?
Sebastian AnthonyJan 26th 2010 11:10PM
Dunno -- give it a whirl and tell me!
Sebastian AnthonyJan 26th 2010 11:10PM
(Guessing not though, as this is a new version of Silverlight.)
GaryJan 27th 2010 5:45AM
Looks cool, however doesn't support scrolling of the center panel via my magic mouse, clicking to scroll is so yesterday!