by Charles Bihis

 Comments (20)

Created

January 13, 2011

Disclaimer: Facebook Desktop is a personal project. It is not sponsored by or affiliated with either Adobe® or Facebook®.

Once upon a time, I was involved in a project here at Adobe called “Project San Dimas“. That project eventually grew into a full-fledged product called “eBay Desktop” which enjoyed some impressive success. I was lucky enough to be part of the protyping, designing, and launching of the very first version, and it was very exciting. More recently, I’ve thought about doing something similar. Introducing, “Facebook Desktop“!

So, what is Facebook Desktop?
Facebook Desktop is a notification engine that gives you updates about your Facebook friends in real-time! Whenever someone posts a story, comments on your photo, tags you in a status-update, whatever…Facebook Desktop will let you know. It gives unobtrusive messenger-style toast messages whenever you have a notification.

Why build Facebook Desktop?
I moved away from my home in Vancouver for work and so Facebook has been a great tool to help keep me in touch with everyone. I found, though, that the browser metaphor for the Facebook “stream” just wasn’t working for me. I didn’t like refreshing my home page constantly to see what people were up to. I also didn’t like keeping a browser open whenever I wanted to read some of my friends posts. So, I made a simple AIR app that hits the Facebook APIs, grabs the latest posts, and delivers them to me in an unobtrusive way. I ended up finding it so useful, I started adding more and more features, like the ability to pause/resume, replay missed notifications, update my status, etc. Eventually, I was encouraged by a friend to polish it up and release it for others to use, and so here we are!

Anyways, if you’re interested in trying it out, install it here:

http://www.facebookdesktop.com/

You can also keep up with the project and reach out to me on any of our community pages:

And definitely, let me know what you think! Your feedback helps me make Facebook Desktop better and better. Until next time, happy Facebook’ing ;)

 
Charles

COMMENTS

  • By chall3ng3r - 12:27 AM on January 14, 2011   Reply

    Good idea, and seems like a nice implementation.

    Keep it up!

    // chall3ng3r //

  • By tony - 6:41 AM on January 14, 2011   Reply

    it just doesn’t work, facebook say “sorry something went wrong” on the login window

    • By Charles Bihis - 8:08 AM on January 14, 2011   Reply

      It actually looks like Facebook is down! I’m sure that once it comes back up, login will work just fine. If not, let me know and I can check it out for you.

  • By Rob - 6:59 AM on January 14, 2011   Reply

    Do you have any plans to open source it?

    • By Charles Bihis - 8:13 AM on January 14, 2011   Reply

      Yes, definitely! I might open-source the whole thing, or just components of it. I’m still not sure yet, but I’ll definitely mention anything on this blog.

  • By Sebastian - 7:05 AM on January 14, 2011   Reply

    It doesn’t seem to want to log in right now…

    “Sorry, something went wrong…
    We’re working on getting this fixed as soon as we can.”

    • By Charles Bihis - 8:10 AM on January 14, 2011   Reply

      I think Facebook is having connectivity issues right now and it’s obviously affecting their APIs. When Facebook is back up, things should work as expected. Let me know if they still don’t and I can take a look!

      • By Sebastian - 3:03 AM on January 15, 2011   Reply

        Yar, it works now :)

        I still find it terrifying that it requests so many permissions, though…

  • By Oscar - 7:00 AM on January 15, 2011   Reply

    I was looking for something like this for a long long time! Thanks!

  • By Jojo Mathews @Around Social - 7:38 AM on January 15, 2011   Reply

    Great work buddy.. Sharing it on my blog…

  • By tony - 5:56 AM on January 18, 2011   Reply

    Ok, now the login page is working, but the window is rezising on its height and it never stops. I’m on windows XP.

    I can perhaps make a video of this if you don’t have the same issue.

    • By Charles Bihis - 11:20 AM on January 18, 2011   Reply

      Hi Tony. Actually, I think I might know what the problem is. I’ve made a bunch of minor fixes to the application since I’ve written this post and I think one of those fixes covers your problem. Could you uninstall the app and re-install from the website to make sure you get the latest build? Just to be safe, you could even download directly using this link…

      http://www.facebookdesktop.com/download/FacebookDesktop.air

      Let me know how it goes!

  • By tony - 12:39 AM on January 20, 2011   Reply

    It works ;) great job !

    How did you managed to succeed with the air facebook api to login ? on my applications and even on the samples available. The persmission wrindow is juste white… Like a bug in Facebook. Whereas previously it was working just fine. Do you use the “”facebook as3 api” actually ?

    great job again !

    • By Charles Bihis - 9:21 AM on January 20, 2011   Reply

      Thanks! Actually, I am using the facebook-actionscript-api. And yes, there is a bug that makes the permissions dialog render incorrectly in AIR (http://bugs.developers.facebook.net/show_bug.cgi?id=14462). I did a band-aid fix in the LoginWindow.as class where I set the vars.display=’wap’ instead of ‘popup’. That’ll change the styles and display the dialog…ugly, but it’ll display. A good workaround until that bug gets fixed. Anyways, hope that helps!

      • By tony - 12:43 AM on January 21, 2011   Reply

        yes it helps ! thank you so much. Nobody were replying to this bug on the official facebook-actionscript-api group ! And my app (e-zen [dot] fr) is now frozen since 1 month. Thank you again ;)

  • By Richard Welch - 4:22 PM on January 26, 2011   Reply

    Nice one looks pretty neat I’ll check out.
    Go Air!

  • By anant - 9:58 AM on February 5, 2011   Reply

    great app. inspiring work 4rm programmer’s point of view
    Go air………………………………………………..go

  • By Gunnar - 1:18 AM on January 27, 2012   Reply

    Hi, nice one. It is real-time notifications or do you poll with a timer? I’m curious since the Facebook real-time api says it only supports servers not apps.

    • By Charles Bihis - 12:37 PM on January 27, 2012   Reply

      Yes, we do poll. We wrote this app before Facebook offered their real-time APIs. And we still could use those APIs in the future (and we might). We would just need to have a server power our app in the back-end instead of Facebook’s Platform APIs.

  • By katherin - 3:15 PM on February 3, 2012   Reply

    las app para facebook oficiales donde las puedo consegir.

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