Here’s a couple neat new features to Messages in iOS 7 Beta 2: you not only can see contact photos for users in Messages.app now, you can also see the time that messages were sent.
First, the contact photos. Similarly to the way some jailbreak tweaks add contact photos to Messages threads, iOS 7 Beta 2 adds a little circle with your contact’s photo in the middle every time they respond. It only works in group messaging, presumably to easily allow you to tell who is responding at a glance, which is a little disappointing: superfluous or not, I’d love for this to be rolled out to individual conversations.
The time stamps are also a new feature. To see the exact time all messages in a thread were sent, simply swipe to the right. Neat!
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
5 responses to “iOS 7 Beta 2 Adds Contact Photos & Time Stamps For Messages”
Not sure if this was new today, but in Mail app if you are in a group of messages in a thread and want to go back to your mail list you can swipe left to right from edge of ipad into the message cluster to go back to your inbox. Nice little feature. You can also swipe when you are out in the list to go to all your mailboxes and see your inbox for different mail accounts.
can’t believe it took until iOS 7 to get timestamps on texts.
Glad its finally here.
Actually it’s there on iOS 6 but you only see when it was carried out and break points in when its restarted.
I love these new features, especially since I’m on the beta and can already take advantage of them. However, I must admit that the new timestamp feature is not intuitive at all. I doubt that many people will know about it unless they read about it.
the swipe for timestamp is actually to the left.