An Early Look At Messages For iOS 10

The new Messages app in iOS 10 adds a ton of new features that should be fun to use. You can animate text bubbles in a number of ways. You can also send full-screen animations. You can send animated drawings and videos. You can attach stickers from developer-supplied packs. There is an easy way to send a quick response to a text and you can also insert emoji without searching for them.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. On this episode let's take an early look at the new features in Messages for iOS 10.
So perhaps one of the most interesting features of iOS 10 is going to be all the enhancements to the Messages app because you can do all these different things besides just sending simple text messages now. So let's go ahead and take a look at that.
So here I've started a conversation with one of my demo accounts and I can type some text just like before. Now you notice that the Send button is now this up-arrow on the right and I can just tap it and it will send the message as before. But, I can do different things now by tapping and holding that arrow. 
This gives me some options there. You can see I can animate the bubble using one of the things at the top. So I can animate say with a Slam and I can tap that and you can see what appears. I can try Loud and that is how it would look, Gentle and that's the animation there. Invisible Ink which gives this little animation there and the person has to tap it in order to see what's there. 
So let's send that one. I'm going to tap that blue arrow there and it sends it. We're seeing what they see. So you can see here they can't read what the text is until they tap on the bubble and then it appears. So this is useful for creating a little suspense or for, perhaps, if you think that someone is looking over their shoulder then they can wait to tap that bubble until they have some privacy.
Now if you do the same thing, tap and hold the blue up-arrow there, and you see at the top its got two options; bubble or screen.  If I switch to screen I will get a variety of these full screen animations. The first one is Balloons. Notice those dots there, the five dots. I'll swipe right to left to go to the second dot and see Confetti, Lasers, Fireworks, or the last dot is this Shooting Star animation. So I can send that on and the person receiving it will get this full screen animation at the time they receive the message. The message itself will just be a normal message after that.
Now the text itself can use emoji in a different way now. Before, of course, you could type emojis. So, for instance, instead of using pizza there I could tap the emoji button at the bottom left and I could find the pizza icon. But notice now when I tap the emoji button I've got two words that colored. These are things that perfectly match an emoji. So instead of actually having to find the pizza emoji I can simply type the word pizza and then go to the emoji keyboard and tap the word pizza and it will replace that word with the emoji. In the case where there are multiple matches like for bike, I tap the word bike and I get choices. So now I can send this message with emoji in it without ever really needing to use the emoji keyboard.
Now when somebody receives the message they can also respond to it very quickly without using the keyboard at all. All you need to do is tap and hold the bubble. So let me tap and hold that last message there and I will get these little responses here. Like a thumbs up or thumbs down, a laugh, exclamation points, or a heart. I can respond very easily by just tapping one of those and it actually puts the response there next to the bubble. So it doesn't put it as a new message there. So it is a quick, easy way to respond. I know I'm always responding with OK or yes I like that, or something like that. This is a quick way to do it with really just one tap and a drag or two taps.
Now you can draw or handwrite in two different ways. One way is simply use that drawing key at the bottom right corner. Do that and now you can draw or write something. Just a simple image and I hit Done and it sends it. I could actually add a comment here if I wanted to include with the image and I can send that off. It just appears as a normal image. This is great because it seems to be backwards compatible because it is just sending an image. So if you send it to somebody with an older device or a non Apple device they will still get this image.
An even cooler way to do writing or drawing is to tap the arrow to the left side of the message, then use the heart with the two fingers button there. These are animated messages here. You've got two sets. Usually you start off here with the Sketch, Hold, Tap on the right and you tap it to change to Tap, Drag, Hold to do different things.
So Sketch is self explanatory. I can sketch something and not only will the sketch appear, but you can see there how it drew itself. So it's going to draw itself just like you drew it. So it's an animated sketch. I can continue now. We can go back and forth just sketching things to each other.
But you also have the ability to do things like the Hold with two fingers will give me a heart. As I continue to hold it will beat and then it sends. A quick tap gives me this ring. If I tap on it and go to Tap, Drag, Hold here I can do a quick tap with two fingers gives it a little kiss. Two fingers with a drag gives like this broken heart. Then a Hold with one finger gives this glowy animation right there.
You can actually go ahead and bring video up with that Video button there and actually do these animations so you can sketch over live video and then send this whole video bit that's got, you know, heart or a drawing going on while the video is recording. You can also tap on the little color button there to change the colors as well.
Now this can actually go way beyond this because if you notice if I tap the little arrow button there and I get the photos and the heart button and I also get this little apps button here. I go to apps and there are a few things there by default. One is I can share music. So it shows me some recently played things here and I assume if I've got Apple Music and the person I'm sending it to has Apple Music I can share some music with them. 
But there is also Swipe Over or tap the four dots on the bottom left and it brings up all these additional things you can do. So there is these images and this little database of these weird animated gifts. I'm not really sure where these come from but there is a ton of them and you can search them. So if I wanted to send a funny cat I can search for cat and I get a whole bunch of cat ones. I assume those all change over time. 
In addition, let's go to those four dots again. You see where it says Classic Mac there is these things called Stickers. I can send a Sticker there and I can add a comment to it. So it's just another way of doing an image.
There is a store here, if I tap Store, and I can actually go in and it shows me which ones I've got enabled. I can go to Featured here and I can get new ones. So a third party should be able to add new ones. There's going to be tons of these little sticker packs with animated images that you can add from your favorite brands or TV shows, movies, cartoons, whatever it is. There will probably be sticker packs that you can get and add to messages. I'm not sure what happens though when you send one and the person on the other end doesn't have that pack. My feeling is that they are just sent as animated gifts so the person will get them no matter what they've got and it probably will even work on android devices as well. If they are just animated gifts they should work fine.

Comments: 9 Responses to “An Early Look At Messages For iOS 10”

Paul

7 years ago

How sad that a formerly innovative company like Apple could be reduced to silly product like this. No wonder the stock is down a quarter of their past value.

Gary Rosenzweig

Paul: Most of this is just fun. What's wrong with fun? I can see using sketching to convey ideas to people over messages too. Or emotion. Not everything has to be so serious -- especially when it comes to communicating with other human beings, which is what the Messages app is for.

Annie

Love new images ideas/emotions! Great presentation in advance of what to learn about New Messages for IOS 10.

Sean

Paul, no one is forcing you to use the new features, so leave it for the kids. Besides, goofy, fun things often lead to extremely useful and cutting edge advances. Drones used to be a kids toy helicopter. The last 25 years of tech is way beyond what was even dreamed about 25 years ago. It's just a phone; even though new uses are still being found, how much more can you expect? It's pretty much replaced everything in your office (except the space).

Jeff Widen

Can't wait for the fun. I'm 75 y/o. There's always time to play...and communicate with fun. My Grandkids are whizzes and we message all the time. Can't wait to see what they'll create. For that matter, to see what my wife and I create!

Gordon Brown

Fun is fine , I'm still having trouble sending ordinary texts since iOS 9.3.2 update.

Gordon: Have you tried contacting Apple support? Visiting the Genius Bar? Or, if it is an SMS issue, contacting the support for your provider?

Ernie

When will this app be available?

Ernie: It is part of iOS 10. Apple hasn't announced a release date for iOS 10, but history tells us that it will most likely be in September or October.

Comments Closed.

An Early Look At Messages For iOS 10

Comments: 9 Responses to “An Early Look At Messages For iOS 10”

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