Unleash the emoji

Two things on the table this week

    Apple just killed QuickTime, and you should, too

    Facebook Messenger isn’t just for smartphones anymore

Get rid of QuickTime pronto

Apple dropped support of QuickTime for Windows, which means they won’t be issuing any security updates for it. Last week a security firm discovered two dangerous flaws which could leave Windows computers with QuickTime vulnerable to malicious attacks.

US-CERT (the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team) advises uninstalling QuickTime from Windows machines.  

Macs are not affected, as Apple continues to support the product on OS X, at least for the time being.

It used to be you needed QuickTime when running iTunes on a Windows computer, but iTunes will run fine without QuickTime. If, for some reason, you have a video file that wants to play in QuickTime, try VLC Player for Windows instead. It will play just about anything, including most QuickTime files.

Uninstall QuickTime as you would any other Windows program, and decline all future offers of it when installing iTunes. You don’t need it.

Facebook Messenger gets an extreme makeover

Do you facebook? If you do, you’re familiar with the Facebook Chat feature. When you chat with someone, a little window opens up containing your conversation. On a smartphone, that chat feature is a completely separate app called Facebook Messenger. Messenger has some interesting things going on.

The normal blue and white theme is so . . . normal. In the Messenger app, you can change any conversation to any of fourteen other colours, and white. 

I do this when I have a couple of conversations going on. It makes it a little harder to reply to the wrong person. 

You can also change the nickname of the person you’re chatting with. Do you really need to see everyone’s full name? Can you get by with just Fred or Dad?

You can also choose a default emoji for any conversation, so instead of accidentally sending that annoying Thumbs Up icon you can accidentally send something more interesting like lipstick or a rocket ship. Here’s a guide to emoji. 

You can use Messenger to voice or video chat with your friends who use Messenger. Be a little cautious with that, or you’ll eat right through your phone’s data plan. There are more tricks, most of which are detailed here. 

By the way, in Facebook Chat you don’t have to chat in a tiny window. If you click on the gear icon at the top right and then on See full conversation, you’ll have that conversation in a page to itself. 

As far as I can tell there’s no way to change the colours or nicknames from within Facebook Chat. However, you can point your browser here to enjoy the web version of Messenger, a full-sized version of exactly what you can see and do on a smartphone.

Thank you!

Thank you to everyone who has already sponsored me in The Great Cycle Challenge. We’re raising money to help kids with cancer. The rides start in June, so there’s still time if you’d like to help. My page is here. 

Questions or comments, email [email protected]

Links

Apple Ends Support for QuickTime for Windows 

VLC Player 

Emoji to English Dictionary

Facebook Messenger Features 

Messenger on the web 

Great Cycle Challenge – my donation page 

This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.