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iMessage + Apps

developer.apple.com

38 pointsbrbcoding21 comments

I admit it, I don't get the draw of these things. I can vandalize people's messages with stickers now? And from the keynote, "Nothing beats a fullscreen moment!"? Ookay.

The amount of applause for "We made emoji bigger!" was ... surprising to me. I got on board the Snapchat train, but I just can't get excited about being able to tap words to turn them into emoji.

In the words of Principal Skinner: Am I out of touch? No, it's the children who are wrong.

>I admit it, I don't get the draw of these things.

On the other hand these aren't features Apple is pioneering. Stickers, larger emojis and other text effects have been in WeChat/Line/FB Messenger/Snapchat for a while now.

Now that iMessage has them, Apple just decided to give those features the classic Apple marketing fanfare.

So in short, "the children" have been using these features for a while now, Apple just decided to let you know they exist.

I clapped for at bigger-emoji line. But I'm over 40 and have to squint to read the pictograms my wife and kids send me.

I'm young, and I don't have to squint for the emoji I recognise, but some of them are more intricately detailed, and so it's difficult to figure them out without squinting. This is a welcome improvement.

Ah that's a good point. My eyes are still at a point where one prescription works for near and far vision.

If it's an improvement it's an improvement and it might as well be as good as it can, but "we caught up to facebook messenger" doesn't feel that exciting to me.

I was really hoping for the iMessage on Android rumors to pan out, but now that they've gone and created an iMessage extensions system it seems a lot less possible moving forward.

Well the fun stuff is just gives more way to express yourself. We might not use it but all these other chatting apps have had this for a while now. Apps, though, like any other thing that opens itself up to apps, have a lot more practicality. For example, the food ordering demo. I'm sure there are other things that would be useful to do without leaving the message thread (think Slack integrations).

I do use facebook's Pusheen stickers. If there are people out there whose states of mind don't correspond as well with a cartoon cat, I suppose they should have the same communication opportunities.

Less the subtitle, my spirit animal: http://i1.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/383/574/c45...

It's for teenagers. The sad thing is the number of developers, sitting through this, including me, wondering what happened.

But then again - 72% are first-time attendees. In other words, developers aren't coming back, but a ton of newbies want the experience?

Also an app for rolling dice in iMessages, I can't wait until someone does that.

No, seriously, someone please do this :-)

That's one I could get behind.

I wonder if it displays which app an image came from. Could I make my own fake dice extension that rolls whatever I tell it to?

It's a mindset thing more than it's an age thing.

My mom uses more emojis than my 14 year old niece.

And my mid-40s sister-in-law sends more Bitstrips than she does regular texts. (I doubt my niece would be caught dead sending a Bitstrip.)

The stickers are equal parts feature-chasing the competition, and a 'serving suggestion' for developers about to code for their platform.

Google wave was just too far ahead of its time. The world wasn't ready yet. And now look where we are. A clean UI and a little magic makes things so much different.

Agreed. It's looking more and more like we collectively screwed ourselves by turning our noses up at Wave.

Instead of selecting text I'd rather have a dedicated softkey to emojify what I type after. E.g. ⁂poop spits out pile of poo emoji. Tap and hold the button and the emoji menus show up.

HipChat uses parens for this, with (thumbsup) turning into a thumbs up icon even if you're communicating through the IRC bridge. It's a bit weird when you're using parentheses for a parenthetical and it pops up the emoticon search, but you get used to it.

The Slack equivalent, which wraps the keyword with colons, :+1: is less likely to happen on accident. I am surprised HipChat went with parentheses, honestly, but maybe they felt they were too subtle for mobile users (I like them, myself). It is nice to have a text-only method of mapping to emoji, though.

For extra fun you can add your own in-joke shortcuts within your organization.

Nintype has a button like that.

It seems that there is no ability to create iMessage bots.

in-messenger apps and payment system - Apple wants to be WeChat

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