I’m hearing tons of complaints about the new Messages Beta for Mac released on Thursday. But my experience with it has been great so far.
My favorite feature: the way Messages handles multiple alerts on different devices. This is one of those things that is just about impossible to make perfect, but I think what Apple has done here is clever, and probably the least annoying way to handle it.
The problem? I have an iPhone, an iPad, and three different Macs I use on a regular basis. (A desktop at home, a desktop at work, and my Air for cafe/travel use.) I have Messages running on all of these machines at once. So what happens when I get a new message from someone? Well, I get an alert on my iPhone, my iPad, and all three of my Macs. Considering I have at least three of these devices within arm’s reach most of the time, that means I get three different alerts showing up in my face, and two others on the other machines that I’ll have to address later. All for the same message.
The wrong way to handle this would have been to force me to dismiss this alert on all five machines manually, or worse, to try and “guess’ on which machine I want the alert to appear. (While that approach sounds good, in practice, it would probably guess wrong more often than not.)
Apple took a better middle road and had the alert go off on all machines, but as soon as I acknowledge the alert on any one of my machines, it goes away on all five. So I only have to dismiss or reply to the message once, and all my other machines get updated. My iPhone and iPad take the alert badge off the Messages icon and remove it from Notifications center. The Macs do the same. I’ve read the message once on one machine, but all the others still have the message, so I can still reply on whichever machine I like later.
How can you complain about that?
Now sure, it doesn’t always work perfectly. I’ve had to dismiss a message on two of the five machines a few times. But it gets it right most of the time.
If it doesn’t work this way for you, there’s probably something wrong with your configuration. Make sure all your devices are set to the same Apple id, and your iPhone is set up to get messages from your email, not just your phone number.
This works so much better than the way Apple has historically handled Calendar Alerts. I can only hope they apply this same logic to those soon.
And as far as the noise goes, if you don’t want multiple devices beeping at you, do what I do. Mute all your devices except the iPhone. For me, the iPhone is the one device I’m guaranteed to have on me at all times. So that’s the one that becomes the official attention grabber. When I’m working on my Mac, I hear the iPhone SMS sound go off, but I can check the message using my Mac.
My iPad is also always set to silent. I don’t even have my iPad vibrate on new alerts, as, again, all of those will go off on my iPhone, which is always with me. Problem solved.
