Transcript
Micah Sargent (0:00)
Coming up on iOS today, Rosemary Orchard and I, Micah Sargent, talk about making magic with messages. Yes, it is the features and the settings that are available to you as part of the Messages app. Stay tuned. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is twit. This is iOS Today with Rosemary Orchard and me, Micah Sargent. Episode 700 recorded Tuesday, January 7th, 2025 for Thursday, January 9th, 2025. Magic with messages. Hello and welcome to iOS Today, the show where we talk all things iOS, iPad, OS, watch OS, TVOs, vision OS and all the OS as Apple has on offer. We love, love, love to talk about them here on the show, love to help you make the most of your Apple devices and I am looking forward to today's episode. I am one of your host name.
Rosemary Orchard (1:04)
Is Maika Sargent and my name is Rosemary Orchard and I think it might be time that we talked about how popular some of us are, Micah and got on top of our messages situation.
Micah Sargent (1:15)
Exactly. Yes, you may be flooded with messages and there are lots of things that you can do within the messages app that you may or may not know about. So we thought it'd be a good time to refresh your memory in some cases and in others maybe this is a feature that you did not know existed. Because that's one of the things about the messages app is over time Apple has added more and more features to it, I think to bring it in line in some ways with some of the third party options that are out there. You know, WhatsApp is an incredibly popular service, not just an app, but a service that people around the world use. And there are other options that people will use on Android for example. And I think Apple, you know, with its pretty popular imessage platform, looks to offer some of this functionality, if not all of this functionality baked right in. So let's kind of kick things off by just talking about the messages app in general with an understanding that imessage is a subset, a service available within the messages app, where an imessage is the sort of system for sending messages to other people. It's the blue bubble system.
Rosemary Orchard (2:35)
Yes, imessage is an incredibly popular feature and it is the blue bubble one, not the green bubble one. And there is actually a great support page on the Apple website, support.apple.com messages which has guides on how to use messages in a lot of different ways and a handy little help article on if your iPhone messages are green. Because this is a problem that people do end up with every once in a while. And yeah, it is a pretty nice application And I definitely use messages, a whole bunch, including to message Micah. And as you can see, these are my messages with Micah. So I sent him a little voice message earlier, and then I sent him a little sticker that said good morning with a little seal bouncing up and down, waving. It's not quite a seal of approval, but I don't know, maybe by the end of the show I can have a seal of approval. And yeah, there, there's a whole bunch on this screen right here, which is quite useful to know about. So starting at the top, obviously in the top left, we have our back button, which takes us back to our list of messages, which, as you can see, I have some messages pinned here at the top. And you can tap and hold on any message from people and, or group and pin that, which is quite nice. You can only have up to nine pins, but once you've got those pins, then you can have those. And I've used my Focus Fil to hide some of the messages, but we'll come back to those later. Um, and then once again, in the messages in the top, in the middle, I can see Micah. Um, and if I tap on him, then I'll get some extra information. So it's not actually showing his phone number or things, so we don't need to worry about that. It will if I tap on info, so I'm not going to do that. Uh, but I can see some options here. I can request my look his location, I can share my location. I can show things from Micah and shared with me. So if you've got a friend who loves to recommend television and shows, and those are just not your jam at all, you can turn off show in shared with you for that particular person or a conversation, you can specify that you want to hide alerts from this person and whether or not you would like to send read receipts. And this is something I really enjoy. It's not just a whole binary on off thing. It is a. You can turn this on and off per person. And then down here, and this is all under where I tapped on Micah's little picture at the top there. And this is the same in groups as well. I can see collaboration. So a document in page that Micah and I were demoing together for hours today, some photos that we've sent each other, some links that we've sent each other, and some documents. And then at the bottom, there's contact key verification, which we'll come back to. And then over, across from there in the top right, is a FaceTime button, which if I were to tap on that would call Micah on FaceTime, which is pretty nice. Then in the middle, we've got our messages. And then the sneaky little thing that I love in the bottom left is that plus icon. And when you tap on the plus, then we've got all of our options. We can take a picture and send it. We can use photos, we can use stickers. There's Apple Cash, which is available to folks in the US there's audio for sending messages, sending later Image Playground, and much, much more, including a handy little images feature. So if you'd like to send an image, for example, to Micah, a little animated image, then I can send him this poke nostos. Why not have both? You can have animated images as well as stickers in messages.