10 New Features In Mac Messages

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at the new Messages App features in macOS Ventura.

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So once you upgrade to Ventura you'll find there are a lot of new features in the Messages App. One of them is the ability to Undo Send. This works only through sending to somebody else who is also using iMessage. It won't work if you're sending to somebody else over their mobile phone system SMS. So if you send something like this and you decide you want to unsend it you can simply Control Click on it and then choose Undo Send and it will take it back. Note that if the other person isn't yet updated to either macOS Ventura or iOS 16 or iPad OS16 then it won't work. They will still see the message that you thought you undid. 

Now another option you have is to Edit a message you've sent. This also only works for iMessage. So if you send something like this and then you just want to Edit it you can Control Click on it and then choose Edit. Then you can change something in the message like that. Then you can Send as normal. Now you're going to see here Edited. If you click that then you'll see the original message and then the change. If the other person is using an older operating system with iMessage they will see both messages there. So they'll get the correct message it will just look a little messier for them than it will for you. 

Now another new function is that you can Recover recently deleted messages. So, you can go here to View and then you can see Recently Deleted. Then it is going to show you conversations with the recently deleted messages. Anything in the last 30 days. You can select it and then you can see that there are three messages here and you can Recover them.

Now Messages already had a Shared With You feature. So when somebody shares something with you, like for instance I can click here and if I scroll down I can see things like Links and Photos that were shared with me. If you actually look under Messages, Settings you go to Shared With You and you can see which apps this is enabled for it. This was here before but what has changed now in Ventura is more apps have been added. Now you may only notice one new app added, Books. So when somebody shares something from Books, like recommends a book to you in the Messages App, then you should be able to see that in the Books App. But, what's more important is that now third party apps can be added here. So developers now have hooks that they can add to their apps and you might see third party apps listed here in the near future. Now I've never had much luck with this feature. Right now I've got a bunch of links shared and I have Shared With You turned on in Safari, but if I go to Safari and go to View, Show Shared With You, nothing appears. So how well this works for you may vary.

Collaborations became a lot easier in Messages. If you have a file in iCloud and you could see that this folder here in the Finder is on iCloud Drive you can, of course, select a file. You can decide to share it right from here but a new way to do that is simply to drag and drop that file into the Messages App. You can see here that it could share in one of two ways. Collaboration is the default. You could also Send a Copy if that's what you intended to do. But if you keep it on Collaboration and the other person of course is using iCloud as well, then you can now collaborate with this app just by doing this. Just dragging and dropping it into Messages is all you needed to do. You didn't even have to open up the app, in this case Pages, to get Collaboration started. They will then get this message in their Messages App, this will work on the iPhone and iPad as well, and be able to click or tap it and then go into the app and start editing it with you. 

Now another improvement to Messages is you can use it to Share Play.  So if somebody is using the Music App or the TV App and you want to say watch a TV show along with them synchronized, before you could do that in FaceTime. Now you could do it with just Messages. But on the Mac you can only receive these. So you can't actually start a messages Share Play this way on the Mac. You can do it on the iPhone and iPad. So if somebody were to do that and you were to get that on the Mac, it would look like this. You would get it right here. You could click Join. So then when the other person actually taps to start Share Play you would see this icon up here like this. Click on it, Join, and the TV App starts and then you're watching the show. Of course I'm screen recording so it is blanking it out. 

Another new feature is now you can Mark a Conversation as Unread. So you can see this conversation here is marked as Read so when going back into Messages later today I may not notice that I haven't responded here. I can Control Click here and mark as Unread or just with it selected I can go to Conversation Marked Unread, Shift Command U is the shortcut, and you could see now the conversation has the Unread dot next to it. You can see here in Messages I've got the little one showing me I have one conversation I need to attend to. 

Now all those features you may have heard before because Apple's been featuring them. But here are a few that are not talked about at all, really by anybody. One is under View there is some new filtering options. So All Messages is the standard filter. But you can also do Known Senders and that will show you conversations with people that are in your Contacts. So a good way to get rid of stuff like Two-Factor Codes and little text messages from companies and things like that and just focus on your friends. You can always click here to go up a level or just changes back to All Messages.

There's also Unknown Senders, the opposite of that. So if you want to do some clean up you might want to go there. Unread Messages will just show you conversations that have Unread Messages in them. Recently Deleted I showed you before.

There's also a new Menu configuration under Edit. Instead of Find being grouped here with Spelling & Grammar and Substitutions in Speech, it is on its own. Which makes sense because Find Messages isn't actually about text editing like this group is. Find is about entire messages or conversations. I'm actually surprised that they didn't change this to Search instead of Find because in fact they call it Search right here. 

Another change that hasn't been talked about is the fact that you can select multiple conversations now. So, for instance, I can select this conversation like that. I can also Command Click and select these two, just like you could say in the Finder select files or in the Mail App to select messages. You could also have one selected and then Shift Click to select a whole range. Now the advantage to doing this is now you can Delete them. So you can delete more than one conversation at a time. So Control and Click and you get Delete or you can just go to Conversation, Delete Conversation and you can actually delete all of those conversations at once. 

There also are some other minor changes. For instance, under Edit there used to be Clear Transcript. So you can clear out a conversation. That is missing now. Probably to force you to Delete them instead so they would appear under Recently Deleted instead of being deleted forever. You can still Click on one message here and then Shift Click on another to select a range. Then you can hit the Delete key to delete those. 

There was also a menu item in View for Use Alert for This Conversation. That is no longer there. But you still have the option, if you go to the information about the conversation, and you can in the checkboxes Hide Alerts. Another change is one you're going to see macOS is that in the Messages Menu it is now called Settings rather than Preferences to fit the change from System Preferences to System Settings. But in the Settings themselves there are no changes. 

Here is one last change but I don't have much to say about this because it is kind of mysterious as to what this change is supposed to be. If you go to the File Menu now you have four items at the top. Duplicate, Move, Rename, and Export App. These seem to be standard File Menu things you would use in an app where you save documents. But they are always Inactive here in Messages. It doesn't matter what you select. You can select an image attachment, a PDF, a message, a conversation. No matter what you select these will never work. So, it may be that this is just a mistake or maybe we get some exciting new exporting features in the future. If you found a situation in which they actually do something, let me know. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.