Your complete guide to Messages on iOS 10

Apple revamped its messaging platform on iOS 10 with stickers, apps and other fun, if at times, gimmicky features. Here’s what you need to know.

In iOS 10, iMessage looks a lot more like Facebook Messenger. Apple added features like Stickers, “Tapbacks” and even apps that you install within iMessage.

Is it overkill? Maybe. Or maybe it’ll do exactly what Apple wants — make you choose iMessage over the increasing number of competing apps like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Google’s upcoming app, Allo.

While some of the features (like apps) won’t be completely ready until the fall release of iOS 10, here are the features we tested in the public beta.

Slam, Invisible Ink and other ways to say ‘I love you’

Now there’s more than one style for your messages. Bubble effects add a bit of personality and emotion to your iMessage conversations by letting you change the way they look to the recipient.

Four bubble effects are currently available:

• Slam: Message body slams into the conversation, with a puff of dust rising off the screen where it landed.
• Loud: Mimicking yelling at the person, the message body starts off huge, shakes a bit, then shrinks back to regular size.
• Gentle: Message body starts off small, really small, then ever-so-slowly it grows to regular size.
• Invisible Ink: The message body is covered with a pixelated overlay, where in order to view what’s hidden underneath the recipient has to swipe his or her finger across the message.

To use a Bubble Effect, compose an iMessage and then force touch on the blue up arrow (if you’re on a non-3D Touch device, long press on the send button).

To preview and select a Bubble Effect, slide your finger across or tap on the circular button next to each effect. As you select each one, a preview will play. Once you find the effect you want, tap on the send button and away it goes. Effects can be used on text and photo messages.

When the recipient(s) open the message, the animation will play and continue to play each time the conversation thread is opened until another message is sent.

Throw confetti all over their screens

Screen Effects are messages that take over the entire screen with an animation and sound. For instance, if you’re congratulating someone, you can make confetti rain all over their screen.

Just write a message, then use Force Touch or long-press on the send button until the Bubble Effect screen is activated. Then, tap on the Screen button at the top of the screen.

There are five different Screen Effects (at least for now):

• Balloons: A series of colorful balloons float across the screen.
• Confetti: A blast of confetti falls from the top of the screen.
• Lasers: Disco lasers scan up and down, emanating from behind the text bubble.
• Fireworks: A series of colorful firework blasts take over the screen.
• Shooting Star: The nighttime sky lights up as a single shooting star streaks across the screen.

Swipe across the screen to switch between effects, then when you land on one that works for your message, tap on the send button.

The effect will remain active until a new message is sent.

Sticker packs and apps

With the official launch of iOS 10 this fall, you’ll see new and familiar apps available right there, within iMessage. You’ll be able to do things like send money through Square Cash or book lunch reservations while you coordinate with friends. Extra goodies like stickers and emoji packs can be downloaded, too.

To get these apps, you won’t go to the App Store — there’s an iMessage app store built right into iMessage.

In an iMessage conversation, tap on the “>” button, then the App Store icon. The first view will be recently used stickers, with a swipe to the left scrolling through installed sticker packs and apps. Apple includes an images and Apple Music app by default. The images app searches Bing for GIFs and the Apple Music app lets you quickly share songs and albums with friends.

You can send a sticker in a standalone message, or (my favorite use) is to drag-and-drop a sticker over a photo or text box of a previously sent message. Doing so adds a bit of life to a photo, or can be used as a response to a message.

Tapping on the four app icons in the bottom-left corner will reveal the app icons for installed apps, along with a button that opens the iMessage App Store. In this view, you can rearrange the app icons or delete apps the same way you do on any iOS device: Long press until the icons begin to move, then drag and drop to rearrange or tap on the “X” to delete.

During the public beta, the iMessage App Store only contains sticker packs from Apple.

Words become emojis

Emojis are getting a lot of attention in iMessage. For starters, Apple tripled the size of emoji displayed in a conversation. But the coolest feature is one that instantly translates text into emoji.

For instance, “beer” turns into the beer emoji. “Basketball” turns into a basketball emoji. And so on.

After composing a message, tap on the emoji button on your keyboard. Your iOS device will analyze the text, highlighting words with matching emoji. Tap on the highlighted word to convert the word into an emoji, either instantly or picking for a few different options. Fun stuff, right?

Link previews in Messages

When you send links, they’ll (almost) instantly be replaced with thumbnail previews. If it’s a video from YouTube, for example, you can play the video directly in the conversation.

Or, you can tap on the link itself just below the preview to open the video or website in Safari.

Send a handwritten note

Turn your phone to landscape orientation while in Messages and you’ll see one of two things: Either the keyboard will remain open where you can keep typing away your next message, or a blank canvas will show up for you to write or draw a message on. If the keyboard shows up, never fear — there’s a button with a squiggly line on it. Tap on it to open the handwritten notes interface.

Here you can write or draw with your finger, or select from a few of Apple’s own designs. However, writing “Thank You” or “I love you” in your own handwriting will undoubtedly earn bonus points with your SO. Messages will save your notes, so you can reuse that shrug emoticon you’ve spent countless hours perfecting (oops, maybe that’s just me).

Once you hit “send” the recipient will see it play back, from scratch.

To edit or remove old drawings, long press on the preview cards and then tap on the “X” to delete them.

A lazy way to reply to messages

How many times in a day do you reply to a message with just “haha” or “OK”? With Tapbacks, you no longer have to write those words out. Instead, you can double-tap on a message, then select from a list replies.

A small chat bubble containing your Tapback is then placed atop the specific message. Currently there are six different Tapbacks: a heart, thumbs up, thumbs down, haha, exclamation point and question mark.

Better read receipt controls

As covered in our list of hidden features in iOS 10, you can turn read receipts on or off for specific contacts. Previously, the read receipts setting was either on or off for everyone. Now, you can leave it off by default, then turn it on for individual conversations (or vice versa).

The default setting is still found in Settings > Messages > Send Read Receipts. To change the setting for a specific conversation, open the conversation thread then tap on “i” button > toggle Send Read Receipts. This setting automatically syncs across all Apple devices signed into your iMessage account, which is a nice touch.

Camera shortcuts

The way you choose and send photos is a lot different in iOS 10.

To send a photo, tap on the “>” button next to the text field, then tap on the camera icon. You will have a preview thumbnail of your camera, allowing you to snap a photo and send it with relative ease. Or you can scroll to the left to view recent photos and videos from your camera roll; tap on one to add it to your message.

If you want to record a video, or view a larger selection of photos from your photo library, swipe to the right and select the appropriate option.

Draw on photos!

Apple is adding its drawing tool, Markup, to more apps across iOS and that includes in Messages. After adding a photo to your message, but before hitting send, you can use the Markup tool to sketch on the image.

With a photo in the text field, tap on it to open the preview. Tap on the Markup button in the lower-left hand corner, then proceed to highlight, draw and write on the image. Keep in mind, anything you do here will not get saved to the image in your camera roll.

Send fake heartbeats. Because heartbeats?

First introduced with the Apple Watch, Digital Touch was originally intended to be a cute (if not gimmicky) way to quickly draw someone a picture, send your heartbeat or tap away on the screen and in turn, his or her wrist.

It works almost exactly the same in iOS 10.

The Digital Touch icon is sandwiched between the Camera and iMessage App Store icons, to the left of the text field. Selecting it opens the Digital Touch app in place of the keyboard.

The big black void in the middle of the screen is where you can tap, draw, or place two fingers on there to send a fake heartbeat. You can also send a kiss by tapping with two fingers, or a broken heart by placing two fingers on the canvas and dragging them down once the heart is displayed.

Digital Touch effects can also be added to pictures or videos. Go into full-screen mode for Digital Touch, select the video camera icon, then record a video or capture a photo. You can record and send 10-second clips, but you’ll need to apply any Digital Touch effects while you are recording.

It’s a tricky implementation, but one that’s hopefully ironed out during the public beta.

How does this all look on a non-iOS 10 device?

With so many new features in Messages for iOS 10, it only makes sense the experience is going to look differently on a non-iOS 10 device. For example, a Tapback on an iOS 9 device sends reads “Jason Liked/disliked/etc.” instead of adding the Tapback icon to the message.

Placing a sticker on a photo or message already in a conversation simply sends the sticker to non-iOS 10 devices, lacking context or exact placement

How to get emojis on your Mac

Love them or hate them, those addictive little pictures are everywhere. And now they’re on your computer too.

Years ago, I was convinced emojis were a fad. That like many tech trends, it would come and go and we would soon forget about the miniature emotion depictions.

Fast forward to today and those tiny images have permeated just about every form of digital text. Emojis are included in the vast majority of my text messages and IMs. They can be found in emails, social posts, Snapchats and even in some YouTube videos. They are a fact of life.

However, if you have ever felt the urge to tag a burrito on the end of a message and realized it’s not nearly as simple on the computer as your phone, you’re not alone. No longer do you need to search the web for a directory of emojis, copy, paste and send. If you’re using a Mac, there are a few simple ways to work tiny-picture magic.

Input menu and hotkey support

Emojis have actually been available in OS X for quite some time, but it’s buried rather deep for quick and frequent access.

To get to the menu, go to System Preferences > Keyboard. Open the Input Sources tab and click the checkbox beside Show Input menu in menu bar. Click the Input menu icon in the menu bar and selectShow Emoji & Symbols. Within this menu, you can search for and select the exact image that sums up your mood.

To enter an emoji, place your cursor where you want it, open the Input menu, find the image you want to insert and then double-click. It will appear where you cursor is.

If you’re emoting more than a few times per day, this method requires too many steps and takes entirely too long. Fortunately, there is a better way.

Apple has included a hotkey to bring up the Input menu. Just press Control + Command + Spacefrom anywhere to show the Input menu. By default, this hotkey shows a condensed menu that automatically places the cursor in the search bar, so you can immediately begin typing to search. And when you narrow down the results enough to select the correct emoji, clicking it once will insert it and close the menu.

Macmoji

If the hotkey still sounds like too much work or you’re used to using Slack, there’s yet another option. It’s called Macmoji and it adds Slack-like emoji input to your Mac.

To install Macmoji on your Mac, head over to the Macmoji GitHub repo, then:

1. Download the ZIP by clicking on the Clone or download button on the right and clickingDownload ZIP.
2. Once the ZIP has downloaded, extract its contents.
3. Open System Preferences > Keyboard > Text.
4. Open the file containing the extracted contents of the ZIP file and drag the emoji substitutions.plist file into the text substitutions field.

To use Macmoji, you need to wrap the name of the emoji in colons, such as 🙂 or :muscle:. When you hit the space bar, the substitution will replace the code with the image.

Macmoji works in any app or text field where Apple’s autocorrection is present, such as Messages, Mail, Tweetbot and many other native apps. Macmoji, unfortunately, does not work in Chrome.

The downside is that you need to know the name or code for each individual picture. Even worse, there isn’t a universal naming system for emojis. What Apple calls the “Grinning face,” Macmoji simply calls “smile.” So you may need to look up specific codes for Macmoji in the text substitutions menu. From there, you can also change the shortcodes to something you’ll remember better or find more appropriate.

And if you want to change skin tones, the developer, Ryan McLeod, says you can tag a skin tone code such as :skin-tone-[1-5]: on to the code and the two will combine. I tried combination I could think of, however, and could not get skin toned emojis to work.

How to use emojis on your Windows PC

Emojis aren’t just for phones.

Who doesn’t love emojis? These tiny, colorful Unicode pictographs are perfect for conveying everything from laughing so hard you’re crying (face it, LOL is meaningless nowadays) to…um…poop.

Yeah.

But while emojis are all over mobile devices, they’re a bit trickier to utilize if you’re using a PC.

Luckily — thanks to Microsoft’s quest to create the most universal of universal operating systems — emojis are pretty accessible on any Windows 10 device through the on-screen touch keyboard (which you can also use with your mouse). Plus, in the Windows 10 Anniversary Update you’ll be treated to an entirely new set of bolder, bigger emojis created by Microsoft’s design team. Emojis are also built-in to Windows 8.1 and supported on Windows 7, which means you can technically use them with some copy/paste action.

 

Emojis on Windows 8.1 and Windows 10

To access the on-screen touch keyboard, tap the keyboard icon in the system tray.

If you do not see the keyboard icon in the system tray, right-click the task bar and check Show touch keyboard button.

Windows 8.1 users will find this by right-clicking the task bar and going to Toolbars > Touch keyboard.

To use emojis, tap the emoji button to the left of the space bar. Emojis are organized into seven categories.

To switch categories, tap a category button along the bottom of the keyboard.

To scroll through emojis in a single category, tap but back and forward buttons on the left side of the keyboard.

To change emoji skin tones, tap the person category and then tap the skin tone button in the lower left corner of the keyboard. You can choose from six different skin tones.

Emojis on Windows 7

Windows 7 supports emojis, which means you can see them when you visit websites with emojis (instead of seeing little boxes), but it does not have a touch keyboard that lets you use emojis in your typing. To use emojis on a Windows 7 PC, you’ll need to copy and paste them from an emoji database such as Get Emoji. Simply highlight an emoji with your cursor, press Ctrl + C and then navigate to the place you want to use the emoji and press Ctrl + V.

Windows 7 only supports black and white emoji.