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Thursday, 12 May 2016

El-Whats goes native on Mac, PC

El-Whats goes native on Mac and PC: Facebook-owned Whatsapp has released Mac and PC desktop clients, meaning you’re no longer going to be shuffling between computer and phone to check the incessant pinging of groups including “nth grade parents” and “Fufu’s 29th Birthday Bash.” We’ve downloaded the app and, in a couple of hours of use this morning, it seems much more stable than Whatsapp Web. Want to give it a try? Tap here to go to El-Whats’ download page.

Oh, and a word to the wise if you’re installing Whatsapp for Mac: Write down how many GB of drive space you have free on your machine, then check back a couple of weeks from now. Why? To see whether the desktop app eats HDD space as much as Whatsapp Web does. If you’ve been using Whatsapp Web on a Mac, odds are good that phantom backups from Whatsapp Web are eating huge chunks of your hard-drive. The problem? It seems iCloud backs up your entire Whatsapp archive daily to a backup folder on every machine on which you use the web-based service. We lost 79 GB of space on a 256 GB MacBook and nearly 70 GB of space on a MacBook Pro. Thankfully, it’s super-easy to delete the offending folder — which seems to stay gone once nuked provided you don’t open Whatsapp Web again. The interwebs have some background here.

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