Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Apple ohoy - fix the iMess(age)

I got into a strange situation lately, and here's how to get "out" of it.

My wife upgraded to Mountain Lion and enabled iMessage for herself. Cool. Worked. But she does not have an iPhone.

When creating a message to her, on my iPhone, there is "iMessage" shadowed on the message field. But these will only reach her on the laptop.

There seems to be no way to select between iMessage/SMS to a certain recipient!

The solution I found (simply by trial and error + luck): copy her phone number from the address book. Create a message with this phone number as the recipient.

Now I have two discussion threads with her - one SMS, one iMessage.

Isn't this a MESS?

What Apple could do is to:

- acknowledge that people using Apple products might still have - say, ehem - an Android phone.
- allow users to switch between "send as iMessage/SMS" for a single message and/or for the recipient.
(I should probably suggest a way for how to do this - otherwise they'll patent even that?)
- keep whatever discussions I have with person X in *one* thread, where SMS's and iMessages are interleaved, by their time. They are already color coded, that is great (blue=iMessage, green=SMS). Just keep them in one pile, it's a one person!

btw, as a precautionary effort I switched the unused entry on my wife's address card from "iPhone" (which didn't have a number) to something else. Just in case the system checked whether a person "has" an iPhone.

Anyways, Apple WAS good at making complex things simple.

Missing that.

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