Houseparty Makes It Easy to Video Chat With Multiple Friends on Your Mac
Mac: Of all the days before (finally) launching the macOS version of its app, Houseparty chose yesterday – the start of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference – to make a big (themed) splash on Apple’s desktops and laptops. And while Apple’s announcement of FaceTime group hangouts likely distracted Houseparty a bit, the app still makes it incredibly easy to chat with a group of your friends right away.
Houseparty’s initial setup process is a bit weird as it forces you to also grab an app for your smartphone to create an account for the service (rather than just do it all from your Mac), but that’s the only major issue I encountered when new to Houseparty. Once you’ve gone through the account creation process and linked your contacts to Houseparty (yes, even Facebook contacts), logging into your account on a Mac makes it easy to jump into a quick video chat with multiple friends at an address one day.
You can chat with any friends who are “nearby”, which means they have an app and are available to “party” if they agree with your request. Otherwise, if you go “online” in the app, you will see a small circle of your face – a live webcam feed – at the top of your Mac. After that, your friends will be able to join a group chat with you (in the form of another head next to yours) without your approval.
In other words, use “around” when you’re working and may not want to be distracted by everyone, and go “online” when you’re just messing around and want to chat.
When you are in a group chat with a friend (or friends), you can either use the tiny circles to see each other, or hover over them and expand them using the two arrows icon in the app. This makes Houseparty more like a mobile self – a split image of chat windows that you can drag and drop to enlarge however you want.
And that’s almost all! Houseparty is a pretty easy way to video chat with friends if they also use the service. And that was another little stumbling block of mine with Houseparty. Even though my friends usually travel in tech circles, I had a fairly small list of contacts available for parties. Maybe we all grew up. ?
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