Edit or Unsend a Message

The biggest news about Messages in Ventura (and iOS 16/iPadOS 16) is that, as with email (see Undo Sending an Email Message), you can now edit or unsend a message send using iMessage (blue bubbles), with some limits:

• Edit a message: To edit a message you’ve sent within the past 15 minutes, Control-click (or right-click) the message and choose Edit from the contextual menu. The message then becomes editable (Figure 29). Make your changes and click the Send icon.

  

  Once you’ve edited the message, all parties can see a notice that it was edited (Figure 30). Anyone can click the Edited link to show a history of how the message looked previously (Figure 31).

  

  

• Undo sending a message: If you think better of a message within two minutes of sending it, you can take it back. To do this, right-click (or Control-click) the message and choose Undo Send from the contextual menu.

  Of course, if the recipient saw the message during those two minutes, they can’t unsee it! (Similarly, this won’t work if the recipient is using an older operating system that doesn’t support unsending messages.)

Mark a Message as Unread

I can’t tell you how many times someone has sent me a message that required some action that I was unable to perform at the time I read the message. Hours later, when I would have had a chance, I’d forgotten, and the message was already lost in a sea of others. A message stands out when it (or, more accurately, the conversation it’s in) is marked as unread, but once you read it, there’s no longer a visual cue that some action is needed.

That’s why Ventura finally adds a Mark as Unread feature to Messages. To use it, go to any conversation and choose Conversation > Mark as Unread (⌘-Shift-U). The “unread” message dot reappears, along with a badge on the Dock icon if your preferences are configured to show it—and the unread status syncs across your devices. Select the conversation again to mark the message as read.

Recover Deleted Messages

When you delete a conversation in Ventura (or iOS 16/iPadOS 16), it no longer immediately disappears forever. Instead, Messages stores the deleted conversation for up to 30 days (similar to Photos), and you can bring it back during that time. To do so, choose View > Recently Deleted, select the conversation you want to restore, and click Recover.

Collaborate More Easily

Apple’s Ventura features page says a new feature in Messages is “Collaboration invitations,” described thus:

Send an invitation to collaborate on a project in Messages, and everyone on the thread will automatically be added to the document, spreadsheet, or project. Compatible with Files, the Finder, Keynote, Numbers, Pages, Notes, Reminders, and Safari, as well as third‑party apps.

That sounds fine, but even in Monterey, I can share a collaboration link to a document, send it to multiple people in Messages, and find that they were all added to the document. So I’m still trying to figure out what the actual new feature is here. The changes in collaboration that I’ve noticed are:

• When you click the Share icon, recent Messages conversations appear directly in the popover, allowing you to send a collaboration invitation to up to four groups with just one click.

• The invitation, as it appears in Messages before it’s sent, is a graphical tile with controls to adjust collaboration parameters—not just a bare link as in the past.

• When a collaborator makes an edit, an activity update appears at the top of the Messages thread (Figure 32); click the Show button in this update to go to the shared document.

Find More in Messages

Searching in Messages has always been a bit iffy—sometimes the word, phrase, or person you’re searching for inexplicably fails to show up in the search results. That hasn’t changed in Ventura, but there is one new twist: Messages now searches the contents of any photos you’ve shared or received in Messages. Using the same capability Photos has to identify people, animals, landmarks, and other objects—as well as text found in photographs.

Alas, every single thing I’ve searched for in the contents of photos in Messages in Ventura has turned up nothing. Your results may vary!

Use SharePlay with Messages

SharePlay lets you start media (such as a movie in the TV app or a song in Music) while carrying on a FaceTime call, and play that media in sync for everyone on the call. Apple said that, in Ventura, you would be able to use SharePlay with Messages, but at the beginning, details of what that would look like or how it would work were sketchy.

Now I understand what’s going on, and it’s a bit less interesting and useful than I had hoped.

You cannot (at least, not yet) use Messages as the vehicle for sharing SharePlay content from your Mac—that’s still exclusive to FaceTime. However, if someone using iOS 16.1 or iPadOS 16.1 or later starts playing media, chooses SharePlay, and selects you (potentially among others), they see two options: FaceTime and Messages. If they tap Messages, you receive an alert in Messages; tap Join to see or hear the shared media in real time.

All participants can control the media (for example, using rewind, fast forward, or pause), but instead of having an audio/video conversation about it, the conversation happens in text within Messages. (You do have the option to switch to a FaceTime call if you prefer.)

I don’t know why such a conversation can’t be initiated on a Mac, or whether Apple plans to add that capability in the future. But I do like the idea of enjoying media with someone remotely while not being distracted by their voice and background sounds.