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Author here: the gist is that it's practically impossible to scroll to the beginning of an iMessage chat, and that's the only way to get to the beginning of a c
by spenvo 5y ago
Author here: the gist is that it's practically impossible to scroll to the beginning of an iMessage chat, and that's the only way to get to the beginning of a conversation. These old conversations take up several gigabytes of space, yet there's no good way to search them (because search for old messages is unreliable).
This aspect of the iMessage user experience has remained untouched for a decade, despite everyone's chats growing longer. Searching for particular iMessages sucks because the results miss the broader context of the conversation (a single message is not useful when you want to reread a conversation).
(Also just noting, as the post author I created a title better-suited to HN's 80 character limit.)
- 4f77616973 5y agoHave you tried emailing Craig Federighi about this? I emailed him a bunch of times about several things and he's a really nice and responsive person. If you do, tell us about it here on HN.
- cryptoz 5y agoRelated, I emailed Tim Cook about iPhone sensor future plans, and a high-level exec of like 25+ years wrote back to me within a week. Apple is remarkably good at getting back to cold emails to top execs.
- quickthrowman 5y agoInteresting, perhaps I’ll cold email them about the pinned contact feature in iMessage being totally worthless. If it just pinned the message thread to the top and didn’t change the icon to a giant circle that sometimes doesn’t show notifications, it’d be fine. I pinned my GF’s message thread and I ended up missing lots of messages and notifications from her and ended up unpinning her so the notifications would show up. Not to mention the comically huge circle icon that is centered when everything else is left aligned.
- 650REDHAIR 5y agoI found pinned messages on Monday. I've now unpinned things. It only made things worse :(
- fiddlerwoaroof 5y agoInteresting, I love the way pinned threads are implemented, especially the big circles
- upbeat_general 5y agoSame here. Shocked that managed to get past an initial beta. It defeats the entire purpose of pinning.
- dave_aiello 5y agoI concur with that. I had a problem that appeared to be a corner case with Apple Pay. I wrote a paper letter to Tim Cook about it, and within a week got contacted by a staff person in his office. He worked exclusively with me to identify issues I had not considered, and followed up on all of the direct effects and side effects until they were resolved.
- 4f77616973 5y agoI emailed Craig about several controversies and he was very quick to reply to me. We last talked about the rumor that Apple was giving iPhones trust scores.
- shitRETARDSsay 5y agoSeconded, I wrote about an issue I encountered on facetime and I was sent many iPhones to test how widespread the problem was.
- spenvo 5y agoI actually did try emailing Tim Cook a few months ago, but I got bounce backs. I tried tim@apple.com and timcook@apple.com but the mailer daemons said the addresses weren't registered. It sounds like a crazy thing to do, but I remembered how Steve Jobs would reply to users' emails and read an article where Tim said he set aside time to read users' emails.[0] [0] - https://www.inc.com/business-insider/tim-cook-wakes-up-at-4-to-read-emails-from-apple-users.html https://www.inc.com/business-insider/tim-cook-wakes-up-at-4-...
- cryptoz 5y agoIt's tcook@apple.com
- spenvo 5y agothanks cryptoz
- JMTQp8lwXL 5y agoSeems like a humble choice for an executive to not take <firstname>@corp.com.
- eric_h 5y agoI was under the impression that Steve Jobs’ was sjobs@apple.com
- alisonkisk 5y ago"steve" was a collision from the start.
- dkarras 5y agoI could imagine Steve Wozniak offering to use surnames only as a joke - because that wouldn't work either.
- just-ok 5y agoIf you can remember a term, any term, that was written in the message, you can search & jump to it directly. For my girlfriend and I, it was the bar we went to on our first date. This feature only gives you small subsets (a couple dozen, maybe) messages near the query result, but then you can just search for the last message again and get the next “page,” so to speak. Of course, remembering such a term is hard, which is what I assume you mean by “search for old messages is unreliable,” but it’s at least a possible workaround.
- Arcuru 5y agoIn the article they say that they have a screenshot of their first several messages and have tried to search for the text in the screenshot.
- just-ok 5y agoHm, yet I have no problem searching phrases that go back at least five years.. I would say the burden of proof is on the author here to extract the database from the phone and prove that the messages didn’t get deleted, lost in an upgrade, or otherwise cleaned up.
- mdoms 5y agoPlease, please just read the article before posting. Please.