Chapter 6
In This Chapter
Sending and receiving SMS (text) messages
Sending and receiving MMS (multimedia) messages
Sending and receiving voice and video iMessages
Using the Notes app
If you’ve never used an intelligent virtual keyboard, you will probably feel awkward typing on your iPhone in the beginning. Within a few days, however, many iPhone users report that they have become not only comfortable using the virtual keyboard but also proficient virtual typists as well. And with iOS 8’s new Quick Type predictive keyboard, typing on a slab of glass has never been easier.
In this chapter, we focus on two iPhone apps that rely on keyboard input: Messages and Notes. By the time you finish this chapter, we think you’ll feel comfortable and proficient typing messages and notes, too.
The Messages app lets you exchange short text messages with any cellphone that supports the SMS protocol. You can also send and receive MMS messages, which can include pictures, contacts, videos, audio recordings, and locations, with any cellphone that supports the MMS protocol.
In addition to the traditional SMS and MMS protocols offered by the wireless carriers, iOS 7 and higher support iMessage, an Apple-provided service that lets you send and receive unlimited messages with text, pictures, contacts, videos, and locations. The good news is that although the wireless operators all charge something for SMS or MMS services, iMessages are free when using Wi-Fi. If you use cellular service, there’s no per-message charge, but an iMessage may still cost you because you’re using cellular data from your plan’s allotment.
The bad news is that you can share iMessages only with folks using Apple devices (iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, and Mac) running iOS 5 or higher or OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion or higher. And, if no Wi-Fi connection is available, the message is sent as a standard MMS or SMS message via your wireless carrier (and subject to the usual text message charges).
Before we get to the part where you send or receive messages, let’s go over some messaging basics:
The Messages app can count characters for you. To enable this feature, tap the Settings icon on your Home screen, tap the Messages icon, and then enable Character Count. Now when you type a line or more of text, you’ll see the number of characters you’ve typed so far, a slash, and then the number 160 (the character limit on some mobile phones, as just described) directly above the Send button.
The character count feature is disabled for iMessages sent to other iDevices, which makes sense because iMessages have no length limit.
Each individual message in a conversation counts against this total, even if it’s only a one-word reply such as “OK,” or “CUL8R” (which is teenager-speak for “see you later”).
Okay, now that we have those details out of the way, let’s move on to how to send a message.
At this point, the To field is active and awaiting your input. You can do three things at this point:
The more letters you type, the shorter the list becomes. And, after you’ve tapped the name of a contact, you can begin typing another name so you can send the message to multiple recipients at once.
A fourth option is available if you want to compose the message first and address it later. Tap inside the text-entry field (the white rectangular area just above the keyboard between the camera icon and the microphone icon) to activate it, and then type your message. When you’ve finished typing, tap the To field and use one of the preceding techniques to address your message.
When you’ve finished addressing and composing, tap the Send button to send your message on its merry way. And that’s all there is to it; you’ve sent a text message.
Your iPhone can alert you to new messages with an audio alert, an on-screen alert, or both.
If you want to hear a sound when a message arrives, go to the Home screen and tap Settings⇒Sounds⇒Text Tone, and then tap one of the available sounds. You can audition any sound in the list by tapping it.
If you don’t want to hear an alert when a message arrives, instead of tapping one of the listed sounds, tap the first item in the list: None.
You can also assign a custom alert sound to anyone in your Contacts list. Follow the instructions for assigning a custom ringtone (see Chapter 4), but instead of tapping Ringtone, tap the item directly below it, Text Tone.
In addition to playing a sound when a new message arrives, your iPhone can also display several types of on-screen alerts. To enable or disable these visual alerts, tap Settings⇒Notifications⇒Messages. You see the screen shown on the left in Figure 6-1. Flick upward on the screen to scroll downward and view the additional items shown on the right in Figure 6-1.
What happens when you receive a new message depends on how you’ve set your notification options, so let’s take a look at them as they appear on the screen, starting at the top:
Swipe downward from the top of any screen to see Notification Center. Note, too, that on-screen alerts are not affected by turning this setting on or off. Rather, the Notification Center on/off switch determines whether or not notifications from the Messages app appear in Notification Center. The upshot is that if you choose banners or alerts as the Alert Style, you’ll still see a banner or an alert on the screen when a new message arrives, but you won’t see it in Notification Center.
Swipe the gray bar at the bottom of a banner downward toward the bottom of the screen to reply. The keyboard will appear and you can type your response immediately without opening the Messages app.
Notifications on the Lock screen look like the one in Figure 6-2, left, regardless of whether you’ve selected banners or alerts. The notifications remain on the Lock screen until you swipe the Slide to Unlock slider at the bottom of the screen or slide one of the notification icons to reply. If you’ve enabled your iPhone’s passcode feature (which we recommend highly), you will need to enter your passcode after you swipe.
You can read and reply to a new message notification in many ways:
To reply to the message on the screen, tap the text-entry field to the left of the Send button, and the keyboard appears. Type your reply and then tap Send.
To read or reply to a message after you’ve dismissed its notification, tap the Messages icon. If a message other than the one you’re interested in appears on the screen when you launch the Messages app, tap Messages in the top-left corner of the screen, and then tap the sender’s name; that person’s messages appear on the screen.
You can also tap the microphone key next to the space bar on the keyboard (not the one next to the text-entry field) and then speak your reply to Siri, who will translate it to text and type it in the text-entry field for you. (To find out more about Siri, your intelligent assistant, see Chapter 5.)
Your SMS conversations are saved as a series of text bubbles. Your messages appear on the right side of the screen in blue bubbles; the other person’s messages appear on the left in gray bubbles, as shown in Figure 6-6.
Did you notice that the words “dinner Sunday” are blue instead of black and underlined? If you tap blue, underlined words, additional options appear on the screen, enabling you to create a calendar event, display the date on the calendar, or copy the event to the Clipboard (for pasting elsewhere).
Moving right along, you can delete conversations in two ways:
If you want to forward to another mobile phone or Apple device user all or part of a conversation (as an SMS, MMS, or iMessage message), follow the same procedure (that is, double-tap a text bubble, tap More, and then tap the text bubbles that you want to forward). Now, instead of tapping the blue trashcan at the bottom-left of the screen, tap the blue arrow at the bottom-right of the screen. The contents of the text bubbles with check marks will be copied to a new text message; specify a recipient and then tap Send.
To delete a single conversation, swipe the conversation from right to left, and then tap the red Delete button.
To send a picture or video in a message, follow the instructions for sending a text message, but before you tap Send, tap the camera icon to the left of the text-entry field. You’ll then have the option of using an existing picture or video or taking a new one. You can add text to photos or videos (by typing in the text-entry field) before or after you select them. When you’re finished, tap the Send button.
If you receive a picture or video (or voice message) in an iMessage, it appears in a bubble just like text. Tap the element to see it full-screen.
For a list of smart messaging tips, visit www.dummies.com/extras/iphone.
Those are all the general Messages tips and hints we have, but we do have one more Messages-related feature to share with you: the joys of group messaging.
If one-on-one conversations in Messages are good, conversing with a group of people is even better.
To start a group conversation, just add two or more people in the To field. Other than that, group conversations work the same way as individual messages, so everything in this chapter works for group conversations, too. But we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention a couple of cool new iOS 8 innovations that make group messaging even better.
You are now an official messaging maven.
The Notes app creates text notes that you can save or send through email. To create a note, first tap the Notes icon on the Home screen, and then tap the New button in the top-right corner to start a new note. The virtual keyboard appears, as shown in Figure 6-7. Type the note. When you’re finished, tap the Done button in the top-right corner to save the note.
After a note is saved, you can tap the share icon at the bottom of the screen to share the note via AirDrop (iPhone 5 or later); send it as an iMessage or email; post it to Facebook, Twitter, or other social media; copy it to the Clipboard for pasting elsewhere; or print it.
To delete a note, tap the trashcan icon at the bottom of the screen.
And finally, tap the Notes button at the top-left corner of the screen to see a list of all your notes, as shown in Figure 6-8. Then just tap a note to open it for viewing or editing.
One last comment: While working with a note, you can swipe left or right to view the preceding or next note.
And that’s all she, er, we, wrote. And you now know all you need to know about Notes! Onward!