Six Tools that Brings Facebook to your Mac Dashboard

Are you a Facebook addict just like me? Are you using Mac OSX & annoyed to start your Safari everytime you wish to get connected with your friends on Facebook? If your answers are yes, then read along. This article will let you know how to do everything on Facebook without using your browser and just from your Mac dashboard.

Why do you need this list ?

There are many dashboard widgets in Mac that perform several particular tasks related to Facebook, but not a single one lets you do all of them. So I’m putting in some simple tools that will let you use Facebook’s most performed tasks from dashboard.

The tasks include,

1. Updating your status & viewing your friends’ status.

2. Batch uploading & downloading of Facebook photos listed under your or your friends’ profile.

3. Viewing Notifications like messages, pokes, friend request, group invites etc.

4. Also some related tasks like creating a screensaver from Facebook albums or syncing your Mac Address Book with your Facebook Friend List.

1. Dashboard Widget

This is the best tool that performs notifying tasks for Facebook. This is designed to bring all the Facebook notifications to your Mac OSX Dashboard. Everytime you have a new notification on your Facebook page, this tool updates your dashboard with it. Following are the notifications that you’ll get from this tool.

1. New Messages
2. Pokes from your friends
3. Friend Requests
4. Group Invites
5. Event Invites

The widget updates on its own, but you can also manually update it whenever you wish to.

2. iPhoto Exporter

If you are among those who likes to share their photos on Facebook, this is the ultimate tool for you. Being a Mac user you are surely acquainted with iPhoto, a tool for organizing your images on Mac. The iPhoto Exporter as the name suggests is a free plugin that lets you upload images to your facebook account directly from iPhoto. All you have to do it is install it, select the images on iPhoto and press the Export button. All the necessary instructions on downloading, installing and using this plugin is provided on the Facebook iPhoto Exporter Developer page.

3. Photobook

This is yet another plugin for iPhoto that lets you Import images from your as well as your friends albums. This is a nice app that lets you do the following stuffs on your Mac

1. Download all the images from you and your friends albums to your iPhoto Gallery.

2. View all photos from your and your friends album gathered in the same page and that also without using a browser.

3. It has a enriched tag management i.e you can search all those above photos based on tags. You will also get a runtime search which means the entries will get short-listed based on keywords in the search box as soon as you type them.

4. Viewing those images includes a slide-show environment with pretty nice transition effects.

4. Friendsaver

Well this is certainly not a tool to do stuffs in Facebook. But it is a nice tool to get you reminded of your facebook buddies. The name actually is derived from Friends + Screensaver. So as it says, this tool will create a screensaver for you including the images in your friends’ album. It will automatically drag images that are tagged with your friends name or simply those which are present in your friends album. Everytime your friend adds a new image to any of his album, it gets pulled in & is displayed as your screensaver. There are yet more to it. To know them visit the developer page.

5. Facile

Its a neat and light-weight tool for Facebook. As the developer says, “It is like Tweetie for Facebook”. You can update your status as well as view your friends’ updates using this small tool. That is all it can do, pretty basic but helpful.

6. Facebooksync

Nice little add-in for Address Book lovers in Mac. This tiny app synchronizes your Mac Address Book with your Facebook contacts. This looks for matches in your contact list with your Facebook friend list and pulls in data like name, address, phone number etc from their profile to your Address Book. Not only this, it also does bring in the photo of the contact along the run.

I hope by now, its a much better experience for you to connect with your buddies without having the pain of opening the browser all the time. Share your experience via comments. Happy Facebook-ing!

Tags: dashboard, desktop app, Facebook