Messages
Messages is not just iChat with a new skin.
Sure, the interface looks different. But in addition to its updated interface,
Messages introduces a big change to the way instant messaging works on the Mac.
That’s because, unlike iChat, it works with
the iMessage platform that Apple introduced with iOS 5. It still works with
standard IM networks such as AIM and Jabber, and it can still send SMS texts to
non-iOS phones.
A
movable chat: In theory, you can start a conversation with someone on one
device and finish it on another.
But it iMessage isn’t just another
messaging platform like all the others. Rather, it ties your Mac and iOS
devices into a single unified ecosystem. You can in theory start a conversation
on your Mac and then pick it up later on your phone. You can again, in theory
see your entire chat history with a contact, regardless of the devices you used
for those chats. And for better or worse, when someone chats with you via
iMessage, you’ll be alerted on your Mac as well as on your phone and tablet.
New look and feel
Messages feels different from iChat as soon
as you open it. Instead of iChat’s single-column buddy list and separate
windows for chats, Messages’ default interface consists of two panes, with
contacts on the left and a chat window on the right.
The left pane isn’t a buddy list. Rather,
it shows you a list of the people you’ve chatted with most recently their
names, the time or date you last communicated with and the last few lines of
your most recent exchange. You can sort that list chronologically or manually.
(You specify that preference in View > Sort Conversations). The default
interface includes some of those venerable status messages (Away, Available,
and so on); if someone is offline, it will say so.
To initiate a conversation with someone, you
can either select the person from the list of recent exchanges or type the
person’s name or phone number in the To field at the top of the right pane.
Messages
feels different from iChat as soon as you open it.
The chat area on the right isn’t dramatically
different from an iChat conversation window: A text-entry box appears at the
bottom; until you begin typing, it displays the name of the service you’d use
for that particular chat. At the top is a camera button for video chats (more
on that in a moment). And in the main window, you see a transcript of your last
conversation.
If you miss the told iChat interface, don’t
worry. Press 
-1 (or select Window > Buddies) to see buddy list like iChat’s.
From there, if you double-click a contact, you’ll go back to the conversation
pane, ready to chat.
For group chats, select multiple people in
your contacts list (as you did in iChat) or enter multiple names, numbers, and
email addresses in the to field. When one person replies in a group chat,
everyone else sees that response.
If you’re having multiple one on one
conversations simultaneously, you can open individual windows for each one
simply by double-clicking each contact in the contacts list on the left. That
may be easier to manage than juggling a bunch of conversations in a single
pane.
When you click the title triangle next to a
contact’s name in the To field, you see a list of all the ways you can reach
him or her, including all of the email addresses and phone numbers he or she
has registered with iMessage, as well as AIM and other conduits.
Select your service
If you do use iMessage as one of your
accounts in Messages, your Mac and iOS devices theoretically become a single
unified messaging tool. But in our preliminary testing, we found that theory
and reality didn’t always sync up.
That business about starting a conversation
on one device and finishing it on another? It didn’t always work. We had
messages appear on our Macs but not on our iPhones, and vice versa. We were
able to identify one possible cause: Contacts who used different email
addresses as their caller IDs on various devices seemed to confuse the system.
Another quirk of the system is that when
someone initiates or continues a chat with you, you’ll be notified about it on
all of your iMessage-compatible devices. So if you have an iPad or an iPhone
lying nearby while you’re working on a Mac, you might go a bit batty when they
all signal at the same time to let you know someone wants to chat.
Messages does inherit some nice features
from the iOS app. You can, for example, opt to send receipts to people you’re
chatting with, telling them you’ve read their message. (That does make it a bit
harder to duck out of awkward chats). You can see when the other party is
composing a reply (and vice versa). All of those iMessage conversations are
encrypted from end to end. You can, of course, use the iMessage system to send
photos, videos, and other multimedia file types; it permits attachments of up
to 100MB.
Messages works just fine as a clients for
the standard IM networks, too-AIM, Yahoo, and Jabber (and by extension, Google
Talk). As noted before, Message also supports SMS messaging; you just type the
phone number into the To field. (You must have an AIM account enabled to do
so). It’s nice being able to mix and match chats with people on all of those
different systems at once. Messages still supports audio and video chats and
screen sharing on the other services.
There is one significant difference between
various types of accounts: When you select an AIM account in the Accounts
preference pane, you see a Privacy tab that lets you limit which of your
contacts can see that you’re online and send you messages. (The options include
Anyone, Anyone In My Buddy list, and so on). That tab isn’t available for iMessage,
which means that when you’re using iMessage, you’re using iMessage, you’re
perpetually available to anyone, unless you block or ignore a specific person.
No
privacy: AIM accounts have a Privacy tab, where you can specify who can see
you’re online; iMessage doesn’t have that tab.
We also noticed an odd split in the way
Messages manages video chats. To video-chat with someone, you click the camera
icon in the upper right corner. That produces a drop-down menu showing the
person’s various addresses. Those associated with iMessage come first. If you
select one of those addresses, Messages switches you over to the FaceTime app.
But if you select an address on AIM or another standard network, you stay in
the Messages app for that session. You can switch from a text chat to a video
conversation midstream by clicking that camera icon.
Messages obviously establishes Apple’s own
iMessage system as first among equals: Wherever you turn, iMessage is the
favored choice. In theory, that may not be iMessage system works, you can do
more with it than you can with the other services.
But that’s the theory. In practice, during
our brief time with the shipping code, Messages has been a hit-or-miss
proposition at best. Perhaps Apple will updates the app and fix the glitches.
Perhaps we’ll just have to learn things. Either way, after so many years of
using iChat whose limitations many of us came to take for granted – Messages is
a big change in chat.
When someone initiates a chat with
you, you’ll be notified on all of your iMessage-compatible devices.
