Screenshot: WIRED
Apple’s latest desktop operating system, OS X Yosemite, won’t officially come out until sometime this fall. But now that its public beta is open, both developers and a large number of Mac owners are able to use a preview version of the landmark OS.
For those who’ve just started using the beta, or are just anticipating its launch later this year, we’ve got some tips on how to best take advantage of the redesigned OS and its many new features. In this edition, we take on the new features in Messages. Messages spans both iOS 8 and Yosemite, but we’ll focus on the OS X side.
Messages has some great new features, especially for group chats, which historically have tended to get out of hand. In the upper right of a chat you get a new Details button. You can tap that to give a particular conversation a title, mute notifications for the chat, add participants, or remove yourself from the thread entirely. If everyone uses iOS 8 and Find My Friends, you can also share your locations with each other. Your positions are tacked onto a map. This Details button also houses a reverse chronological collection of the photos sent in the messaging thread, like a dedicated private photo stream for a conversation.
Through this details panel you also have the option to select a specific contact in the conversation to voice call, FaceTime, or share your screen with. When you make a request to share your screen, you can accept, decline, or block a user. A screensharing icon shows up in the upper menu bar of your homescreen which you can tap for additional controls like enabling or disabling audio chatting, pausing or ending the screenshare, or allowing the other person to control your screen. This should be incredibly useful for troubleshooting family iOS or OS X issues.
In the shift from making voice calls to more often texting with friends and family members, I occasionally lament being able to hear their voice—but not so much that I’d want to go back and forth leaving voicemails. Those days are definitely over. But that’s where a new feature called Soundbites come in. This is something other messaging apps like WhatsApp have offered for a while, and while you could always choose to send an audio file over text on iOS, this built-in functionality makes it far quicker and simpler.
Soundbites makes it possible to send audio messages to a friend which they can open and listen to at their leisure, without the urgency of a phone call. On the Mac, and in iOS 8, you tap a microphone button to the side of the message compose field to record one of these audio clips to send over Messages. The message is sent as a blue Message bubble the recipient can tap to download and play, and both you and the recipient can individually choose to keep it, or let it expire into the ether of ephemeral, self-destructing messages after a two-minute time span. In the beta I’m using, the audio is noisy and compressed sounding, more like it’s coming from a CB radio rather than a desktop computer, but I’d expect this quality to improve over time. Also in its current implementation, soundbites exist solely within a messaging thread, they aren’t collected in the Details panel for easy perusal later. It could be handy to have these voice messages collected in a single place, but we’ll see if that’s something Apple decides to change as the product evolves.
The beta of Messages works quite well, and the changes Apple has made to the experience, while some are quite subtle, are all positive improvements should you choose to use them. For me, now that I can mute chatty conversation threads, I think I’ll be using Messages far more on the desktop than I did before.
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