Facebook’s Experimental Notifications App For Mac Is Super Slick
If you’re on a Mac and you use Facebook frequently, you’re going to love this. We’ve stumbled across a new experimental application being developed in-house at Facebook that’s called “Desktop Notifications“. It’s exactly what it sounds like — the application sits in your menubar at the top of the screen, giving you easy access to your News Feed, recent Wall Posts, and messages. It appears that the application is open for anyone to download (though it’s only got a few dozen fans so far) but note that Facebook is clearly labeling this as a prototype and experimental, so don’t expect any support if something gets messed up.
The application is native, which means it doesn’t have any of the CPU usage issues or quirks of Adobe AIR. Using the app is very straightforward: as new messages, notifications, and wall posts come in, you’ll see a Growl-like notification box slide into view. Even better for avid sharers, the application features a universal hotkey for sending out a new status update, though this doesn’t seem to have support for all of Facebook Publisher’s functionality (sharing photos, etc.).
