Indirect

For those who feel that the Meta’s social media platform, Instagram, can be too distracting on a desktop operating system that is sometimes used for work, but also that the web interface is lacking in features and the original app feel outdated, Indirect helps you stay in touch with your friends and preview their stories in real-time.

When booting up the program, users are met with a familiar two-pane layout, where the contacts are displayed on the left side and the chat section can be interacted with on the right side. For times when words cannot fully express your emotions, a comprehensive set of emoticons can be brought up, browsed and searched through by right-clicking the bottom left menu.

Animated stickers or GIFs featuring a wide variety of movie scenes and real-life events can be sent to your interlocutor in order to convey an even broader range of emotions that triggered your reactions. Sharing images is also available for situations in which you want to ensure that the pictures are forever kept inside your chat for reference purposes, instead of links to websites that can be shut down in time.

Multitasking is an important part of everybody’s workflow nowadays. In order to save time and concentrate on more things concomitantly, voice dictation is present as an added bonus for accessibility reasons and circumstances in which typing on the keyboard may feel too slow to keep up with the latest piece of news that you want to share with your friend.

Following Microsoft’s latest iteration of the Fluent design language, the program seamlessly blends in with the rest of the built-in Windows applications. Its modern design and clean interface enhance the user experience and take it to higher levels. In terms of added functionality, Instagram stories can be previewed without having to leave the app, letting users quickly comment on the context of the stories shared by friends.

Your messages can be quickly “unsent” so that you can avoid embarrassing situations due to typos or misinformation. Moreover, when receiving multiple messages with different contexts and ideas expressed in them, users can reply to each of them individually. For spreading pieces of news to other friends, copying messages is done via the context menu, which can be triggered by right-clicking the respective chat bubble.

Accounts can be easily switched through the application’s main menu for those running businesses and fulfilling various customer service roles. A fully functional search bar allows users to find other Instagram users to chat with in a fast manner. In order to preserve screen real estate, a small, yet resizable popup window of a given chat can be triggered to let you focus only on the current conversation while working on your projects.

Whether you have friends whose primary communication platform is Instagram or the main desktop application feels too outdated or overkill for your use case, Indirect can help you focus only on the conversations you have with your friends to avoid falling into the never-ending scrolling feed of social media.