WhatsApp Updates iOS App With Voice Calling Feature

WhatsApp, the popular mobile messaging service owned by Facebook, has released a major update to its iPhone app today. The update includes the highly-anticipated WhatsApp Calling feature, which rolled out to every Android user late last month. The WhatsApp Calling feature is comparable to Skype and the FaceTime Audio service on iOS. Data charges may apply while using the WhatsApp Calling feature.

“Call your friends and family using WhatsApp for free, even if they’re in another country. WhatsApp calls uses your phone’s Internet connection rather than your cellular plan’s voice minutes,” said WhatsApp in its app update description.

Unfortunately, The WhatsApp Calling feature is rolling out slowly so you may not see it right away. The new calling feature should be available for every iOS user within the next few weeks. Prior to launching WhatsApp Calling for Android, the messaging company ran a lengthy beta test.

WhatsApp version 2.12.1 also includes an iOS 8 share extension, a quick camera button in chats, the ability to edit your contacts right from WhatsApp and an option to send multiple videos at once. You can also crop and rotate videos before sending them. The iOS 8 share extension lets you share photos, videos and links to WhatsApp from other apps. And the quick camera button lets you seamlessly capture photos and videos or choose a recent camera roll photo or video.

How does WhatsApp Calling for iOS work? If someone calls you through WhatsApp, you will see a push notification from the messaging service showing who the call is from. Once you answer the call, you will notice that there are options to mute the call or put it on speakerphone. You can also send a message to the person calling you. If the WhatsApp Calling feature for iOS is similar to the Android app, then you will see a Calls tab that has a list of your incoming, outgoing and missed WhatsApp calls. Personally, I do not have access to WhatsApp Calling for iOS app yet.

Launched in 2009, WhatsApp started out as a simple group text messaging app. Four years later, WhatsApp added a voice messaging service. And then Facebook acquired WhatsApp for $19 billion in February 2014. Several months ago, WhatsApp launched a desktop client called WhatsApp Web — which you can activate with an Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone or Nokia S60 device.

Earlier this month, WhatsApp hit 800 million monthly active users. WhatsApp has been adding about 100 million monthly active users every four months since August. In January, WhatsApp hit 700 million monthly active users. WhatsApp now has more users than every other messaging app, including Facebook Messenger. It took Facebook about 8 years to hit 1 billion users. Facebook now has about 1.4 billion monthly users and Facebook Messenger has roughly 600 million users.

Have you updated to the latest version of WhatsApp? Do you have access to the voice calling feature yet? What are your thoughts about WhatsApp Calling? Let us know in the comments section.

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Download WhatsApp Photos via Dropbox

A friend has a book publishing business and have customers across the country who sell these books. They are old-school businesses that always relied on paper-based forms and fax for sending orders but now that they have WhatsApp on their mobile phones, they write their requirements on paper, snap an image and send it via WhatsApp. On this side, the received WhatsApp images are saved to the computer, printed and sent to the respective departments for processing

The problem with the workflow is that there are quite a few steps involved after the WhatsApp image is received. Since WhatsApp neither offers a desktop client and nor does it allow integration with services like IFTTT or Zapier, the incoming images have to manually transferred from the phone to computer for sending to the printer. Is there a way to automate these steps? Yes.

When a photograph, or any media file, is received inside WhatsApp, it is automatically saved to the phone’s physical memory. The media is downloaded without you having to open the corresponding message (we are dealing with Android here, the iPhone version of WhatsApp may work differently).

Now that we know that the incoming image file is on the phone’s SD card, all we need is way to automatically transfer the file to our computer. That’s where Dropbox or Google Drive can help.

Download WhatsApp Photos to Computer

We can watch the Media folder of WhatsApp and as soon as a new file is added to that folder, it is automatically synced with Dropbox. MetaCtrl has Android apps for Dropbox, Google Drive and Box that can help here.

1. Open your Dropbox and create a folder, say WhatsApp.
2. Launch the DropSync app and authorize it to access your Dropbox account.
3. Set the Local (watch) folder as /storage/emulated/0/WhatsApp/Media/WhatsApp Images and set the Dropbox folder as the one that you created in Step #1.
4. Set the sync method as “Upload only” so that it is not a 2-way sync and only WhatsApp images are sent to Dropbox but not the other way.
5. Go to the app settings and change the Autosync Interval to 5 minutes (the default is an hour).

That’s it. Within minutes of you getting an image on WhatsApp, it will be sent to your Dropbox account in the cloud and since you have Dropbox running on your desktop too, the image will be downloaded on the computer as well.

Automatically Printing the WhatsApp Photos

The next step is to send these images from the Dropbox folder to your printer connected to the computer.

This isn’t difficult either. You can open this Windows Printing script on the computer and it will automatically send images from the Dropbox folder to the printer. A similar remote printing option is available for Mac and Linux as well.

Please do however note that this will download and print all WhatsApp images so you want to have a human layer that discards the non-essential ones.

(source)

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