WhatsApp introduces major change after a decade – but users are saying it ‘hurts their eyes'
The update has radically changed the app's appearance, bringing it closer to other versions of WhatsApp.
2
WhatsApp have updated the appearance of their desktop app
Credit: Getty
2
The change has divided users of the popular messaging service
Credit: Alamy
WhatsApp's new look is a sleek all-black design, with redesigned tabs.
Previously, the user interface had a blue-grey colour and lines to separate various chats.
The huge overhaul was intended to make it easier for users to swap between chats and applies to the web version of WhatsApp.
The change brings the desktop version closer to the mobile app.
Read More on Social Media
TIME FLIES Crazy new social media tactic where passengers arrive 15 minutes before a flight
Upon opening Whatsapp after the update, users are greeted with a message which reads: 'Starting today, we're introducing a brand new design for WhatsApp Web.
'You'll notice that some things look completely different but everything works the same as before.'
However, the huge redesign has divided fans.
Some have praised the app's new look, saying that it is 'beautiful'.
Another gushed: 'I love this new WhatsApp look and feel.'
Others were much more upset.
WhatsApp reveals exacty how to block one of your contacts
One complained that the redesign was "hurting my eyes' and another wrote 'what the f*** is the new WhatsApp web look'.
Users aren't able to change their WhatsApp background on their desktop, unlike on their mobile.
It is also impossible for fans to update their status on their desktop.
The news comes after Facebook users were warned to make an important change to stop their chats becoming public.
Like WhatsApp, Facebook is owned by Meta who have developed the highly advanced MetaAI.
When users click 'share' or 'post to feed' when using the AI, they are actually sharing this with thousands of strangers.
Meta has now implemented a new pop-up warning which asks users to agree to their chats landing on the app's discovery page.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Reuters
4 hours ago
- Reuters
Apple's top AI executive Ruoming Pang leaves for Meta, Bloomberg News reports
July 7 (Reuters) - Apple's (AAPL.O), opens new tab top executive in charge of artificial intelligence models, Ruoming Pang, is leaving the company for Meta Platforms (META.O), opens new tab, Bloomberg News reported on Monday, citing people with knowledge of the matter. Pang, manager in charge of the company's Apple foundation models team, will join Meta's new superintelligence team for a compensation package worth millions of dollars per year, the report added. Meta and Apple did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment. The development comes as tech giants such as Meta aggressively chase high-profile acquisitions and offer multi-million-dollar pay packages to attract top talent in the race to lead the next wave of AI. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has reorganized the company's AI efforts under a new division called Meta Superintelligence Labs, Reuters reported last week. The division will be headed by Alexandr Wang, former CEO of data labeling startup Scale AI. He will be the chief AI officer of the new initiative at the social media giant, according to a source. Last month, Meta invested in Scale AI in a deal that valued the data-labeling startup at $29 billion and brought in its 28-year-old CEO Wang.
Times
8 hours ago
- Times
A few human brains are the real smart ones in the AI arms race
D on't be fooled by the talk of artificial intelligence outsmarting humans. AI is all about real-life people and we are in the middle of a full-blown war for their brains. In the largest-ever poaching effort in corporate history, stories are circulating that Mark Zuckerberg is dishing out football-style signing-on bonuses of up to $100 million a head to lure the sharpest AI minds to Meta Platforms. Wired magazine reported that $300 million over four years was on offer. 'The market's hot; it's not that hot,' is how Andrew Bosworth, chief technology officer at Meta, dismissed it. Instead, he insisted, there are a 'small number of leadership roles' that command a premium and might make a $100 million package. Semantics, some might say, but if the exact number of zeroes on offer is unclear, the skyward trend is not.
The Guardian
8 hours ago
- The Guardian
Face With Tears of Joy: A natural History of Emoji by Keith Houston review
In 2016, Apple announced that its gun emoji, previously a realistic grey-and-black revolver, would henceforth be a green water pistol. Gradually the other big tech companies followed suit, and now what is technically defined as the 'pistol' emoji, supposed to represent a 'handgun or revolver', does not show either: instead you'll get a water pistol or sci-fi raygun and be happy with it. No doubt this change contributed significantly to a suppression of gun crime around the world, and it remains only to ban the bomb, knife and sword emoji to wipe out violence altogether. As Keith Houston's fascinatingly geeky and witty history shows, emoji have always been political. Over the years, people have successfully lobbied the Unicode Consortium – the cabal of corporations that controls the character set, including Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple – to include different skin colours and same-sex couples. It was easy to agree to add the face with one eyebrow raised, the guide dog and the egg. But not every request is granted. One demand for a 'frowning poo emoji' elicited this splendid rant from an eminent Unicode contributor, Michael Everson: 'Will we have a crying pile of poo next? Pile of poo with tongue sticking out? Pile of poo with question marks for eyes? Pile of poo with karaoke mic? Will we have to encode a neutral faceless pile of poo?' Contrary to popular belief, the word 'emoji' has nothing to do with emotions, but instead combines the Japanese terms for 'picture' and 'written character'. The origin of such sets of symbols has been determined by dogged tech researchers to stretch back much further than the first iPhone, or even the regular mobile phones and electronic PDAs that preceded them. A basic set of emoji could be found in the operating systems of some 1980s electronic typewriters and word processors from manufacturers such as Sharp and Toshiba. Long before that, Houston notes, humans used pictographic characters such as hieroglyphs. Later, movable type saw an efflorescence of publishers' symbols such as the pilcrow (for a new paragraph) and the lamentably under-used manicule (a tiny pointing hand in the margin). And before emoji proper there was a craze for smileys, or emoticons, made out of regular alphanumeric characters, such as the excellent shrug, still sometimes encountered in the wild: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Indeed, Houston makes the intriguing argument that the age of the mechanical typewriter represented an unusual historical interlude of expressive poverty. Once humans were freed from the unnatural restrictions it imposed, there was bound to be a new flourishing of symbolic play. Such considerations often lead the unwary to suppose that emoji might constitute a 'language', which they definitely don't. To demonstrate why, Houston recalls the Emoji Dick stunt of 2009, whereby developer Fred Benenson had thousands of people contribute to a crowd-sourced 'translation' of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick into emoji. If this were a bona fide language, it should be possible to translate Emoji Dick back into something close to the original with no knowledge of the source text. It isn't. As Houston argues, then, emoji are possibly a 'script' (a method of writing), and a set of emoji might be a lexicon (a vocabulary), but you can't communicate anything complex in emoji. It is better, perhaps, to think of emoji as an expanded palette of expressive punctuation. Where next, then, for these little yellow blobs of joy? Unicode has no intention of adding any more flags, the least used category of emoji. The second least popular kind, oddly, is mammals, a fact that has me determined to use more cat faces in future. At some point they will surely have to retire the floppy disk emoji, a picture of an obsolete storage format that millions of younger people have never even seen. Should we even be able, Houston wonders, to create our own custom emoji? As someone who is grateful he doesn't have to reinvent the full stop every time he reaches the end of a sentence, I doubt most people could be bothered. Face with Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji by Keith Houston is published by Norton (£14.99). To support the Guardian order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
