Chapter 5
In This Chapter
Setting up your accounts
Reading and managing email messages
Searching for email messages
Sending email messages
Setting email preferences
Using the Messages app
Lending your voice to iMessages
On any computing device, emails come and go with a variety of emotions. Messages may be amusing or sad, frivolous or serious. Electronic missives on the iPad are almost always touching.
The reason, of course, is that you’re touching the display to compose and read messages. Okay, so we’re having a little fun with the language. But the truth is, the bundled Mail app on the iPad is a modern program designed not only to send and receive text email messages but also to handle rich HTML email messages — formatted with font and type styles and embedded graphics. If someone sends you mail with a picture, it’s quite likely that the picture is visible right in the body of the message. (That’s the default behavior, but your results may vary depending on the sender’s email capabilities and your iPad’s mail settings.)
Furthermore, your iPad can read several types of file attachments, including (but not limited to) PDFs, JPG images, Microsoft Word documents, PowerPoint slides, and Excel spreadsheets, as well as stuff produced through Apple’s own productivity software, notably Pages, Keynote, and Numbers. (As you’ll discover, you can mark up attachments too, those you receive or those you send out.) Better still, all this sending and receiving of text, graphics, and documents can happen in the background, so you can surf the web or play a game while your iPad quietly and efficiently handles your email behind the scenes.
Apple even lets you grant VIP status to important senders so that there’s almost no chance you’ll miss mail from the people who matter most. Let’s see, there’s your spouse, your kids, your boss … are we missing anybody?
First things first. To use Mail, you need an email address. If you have broadband Internet access (that is, a cable modem, FiOS, or DSL), you probably received one or more email addresses when you signed up. If you’re one of the handful of readers who doesn’t already have an email account, you can get one for free from Yahoo! (http://mail.yahoo.com
), Google (http://mail.google.com
), Microsoft Outlook (http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook-com/
), AOL (www.aol.com
), or numerous other service providers.
Or you can get a free premium email account (for example, [email protected]
) from Apple as part of iCloud. From your Home screen, just tap Settings ⇒ Mail, Contacts, Calendars ⇒ iCloud.
Finally, while the rest of the chapter focuses on the Mail app, you can also use Safari to access most email systems, if that’s your preference.
Chapter 3 explains the option of automatically syncing the email accounts on your Mac or Windows PC with your iPad. If you chose that option, your email accounts should be configured already on your iPad. And if you signed in with an iCloud account while setting up your iPad (read Chapter 2), you should already be good to go with your iCloud email account. You may proceed directly to the later section “See Me, Read Me, File Me, Delete Me: Working with Messages.”
Remember that syncing email accounts doesn’t have any effect on your email messages; it merely synchronizes the settings for email accounts so you don’t have to set them up manually on your iPad.
If you don’t want to sync the email accounts on your Mac or PC, you can set up an email account on your iPad manually. It’s not quite as easy as clicking a box and syncing your iPad, but it’s not rocket science either. Here’s how you get started:
If you have no email accounts on your iPad: The first time you launch Mail, you see the Welcome to Mail screen. Your choices are iCloud, Microsoft Exchange (business email), Google (Gmail), Yahoo!, AOL, Microsoft Outlook.com, and Other.
Merely tap the account type you want to add to the iPad and follow the steps in the upcoming “Setting up an account with another provider” or “Setting up corporate email” section.
If you have one or more email accounts on your iPad and want to add a new account manually: Tap Settings on the Home screen and then tap Mail, Contacts, Calendars ⇒ Add Account.
You see an Add Account screen, shown in Figure 5-1, with the same account options that appear on the Welcome to Mail screen. Proceed to one of the next three sections, depending on the type of email account you selected.
If your account is with iCloud, Gmail (Google), Yahoo!, AOL, or Outlook, follow these steps:
Enter your name, email address, password, and optional description, as shown in Figure 5-2.
If you don’t add a description (such as Work or Personal), the field usually fills in automatically with the contents of the Address field. Some accounts don't have space for a description or even your name. In other words, all that is required is an email address and password.
Tap the Next button in the upper-right corner of the screen.
You’re finished. That’s all there is to setting up your account. You can now proceed to “See Me, Read Me, File Me, Delete Me: Working with Messages.”
If your email account is with a provider other than iCloud, Gmail (Google), Yahoo!, AOL, or Microsoft Outlook, you have a bit more work ahead of you. You need a bunch of information about your email account that you may not know or have handy.
We suggest that you scan the following instructions, note the items you don’t know, and go find the answers before you continue. To find the answers, look at the documentation you received when you signed up for your email account or visit the account provider’s website and search there.
Here’s how you set up an account:
Fill in the name, address, password, and description in the appropriate fields, and then tap Next.
With any luck, that’s all you’ll have to do. The iPad will look up and retrieve your account credentials. If that doesn’t happen, continue with Step 4.
Tap the Next (or Save) button in the upper-right corner to create the account.
You’re now ready to begin using your account. See the section “See Me, Read Me, File Me, Delete Me: Working with Messages.”
The iPad makes nice with the Microsoft Exchange servers that are a staple in large enterprises, as well as many smaller businesses.
What’s more, if your company supports Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync, you can exploit push email so that messages arrive pronto on the iPad, just as they do on your other computers. (To keep everything up to date, the iPad also supports push calendars and push contacts.) For push to work with an Exchange Server, your company must be simpatico with one of the last several iterations of Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync (most companies are). If you run into a problem, ask your company’s IT or tech department.
Setting up Exchange email isn’t particularly taxing, and the iPad connects to Exchange right out of the box. However, you might have to consult your employer’s techie-types for certain settings.
Start setting up your corporate email on your iPad by following these steps:
On the next screen, as shown in Figure 5-4, enter the Server email address, assuming that the Microsoft Autodiscover service didn’t already find it. Tap Next when you’re done.
That server address may begin with exchange.company.com.
Choose which information you want to synchronize through Exchange by tapping each item you want.
You can choose Mail, Contacts, Calendars, Reminders, and Notes. When one of these switches is turned on, it turns green, as in Figure 5-5; otherwise, what you see appears dimmed.
If you’re moonlighting at a second job, you can configure more than one Exchange ActiveSync account on your iPad; prior to iOS 5, there was a limit of just one such account per device.
Now that your email accounts are all set up, it’s time to figure out how to receive and read the stuff. Fortunately, you’ve already done most of the heavy lifting when you set up your email accounts. Getting and reading your mail are a piece of cake.
You can tell when you have unread mail by looking at the Mail icon at the bottom of your Home screen. The cumulative number of unread messages across all your email inboxes appears in a little red badge in the upper-right area of the icon. If you have many unread messages, you may see the number appear as 6…23 (signifying, say, 62,523 messages — yes, we get lots of mail).
In the following sections, you find out how to read messages and attached files and send messages to the trash or maybe a folder when you’ve read them. Or, if you can’t find a message, check out the section on searching your email messages. Reading email on an iPad versus a desktop or notebook computer is similar, except you have the advantage of the iPad’s touchscreen.
To read your mail, tap the Mail icon on the Home screen. Remember that what appears on-screen depends on whether you’re holding the iPad in landscape or portrait mode as well as what was on the screen the last time you opened the Mail app:
Landscape: With the iPad in landscape mode, you see All Inboxes at the top of the Mailboxes section (see Figure 5-6), which, as its name suggests, is a repository for all the messages across all your accounts. The number to the right of All Inboxes (64,136 in Figure 5-6) matches the number (or abbreviated shortcut) on the Mail icon on your home page. Again, it’s the cumulative tally of unread messages across all your accounts.
Below the All Inboxes listing are the inboxes for your individual accounts. The number to the right of them, as you’d expect, is the number of unread messages in those accounts (981 in iCloud and 63,155 in Gmail, inthe example shown in Figure 5-6).
If you tap an account, you see the available subfolders for that account (Drafts, Sent Mail, Trash, and so on).
One of these accounts is the VIP mailbox. The VIP mailbox lists all the messages from senders you deem the most important. We tell you how to give someone VIP status in the later section, “More things you can do with messages.”
Depending on the last time the Mail app was open, you may alternatively see previews of the messages in your inbox in the left panel. Previews show the name of the sender, the time the message arrived, the subject header, and the first two lines of the message. (In Settings, you can change the number of lines shown in the preview from one line to five or to no preview lines.)
Messages display in threads, or conversations, making them easy to follow. Of course, you can still view accounts individually. Follow these steps to read your email:
If the email mailbox you want to see isn’t front and center, tap the Mailboxes button in the upper-left corner of the screen to summon the appropriate one.
Again, this button may say All Inboxes, Mailboxes, or some other folder name, or it may say the name of the email account that is currently open. Within an email account, you can see the number of unread messages in each mailbox.
(Optional) To summon new messages, swipe down the left panel that lists your accounts or mailboxes and immediately release.
If you see a spinning gear, the iPad is searching for new mail.
Swipe down one of the inboxes or accounts to refresh that specific mailbox. To summon the unified inbox, tap All Inboxes instead.
If a blue dot appears next to a message, the message hasn’t been read.
When you’ve finished reading, tap the Mailboxes button in the upper-left corner of the message.
The button carries a different name, depending on which account you have open. For example, it may say Exchange, Inbox, or something else.
Read additional messages.
When a message is on-screen, the buttons for managing incoming messages appear at the top, most of which you’re already familiar with.
Apple lets you thread messages, or have Mail automatically group related missives. The beauty of this arrangement is that you can easily trace an email conversation. When you organize messages by thread, the related messages appear as a single entry in the mailbox, with a double right-pointing arrow cluing you in that the message is indeed part of a larger ongoing exchange. If a message is not part of a thread, you just see the time, day, or date that that single message arrived. Figure 5-8 (left) shows that Bob and Melisa are hanging together by a thread — tapping the listing reveals underlying messages that make up the conversation. When you tap the message preview, you see previews of those underlying messages, as shown in Figure 5-8 (right).
When you look at a message that’s part of a thread, the numbers at the top of the screen (visible in portrait mode) tell you the message’s location in the conversation. For example, in Figure 5-8 (right), the message we chose to read is number 1 of 3 in this thread.
To turn on threading, go to the Home screen and tap Settings ⇒ Mail, Contacts, Calendars, and then tap on Organize by Thread so that green is visible, as shown in Figure 5-9. You may have to scroll down to see the Organize by Thread setting.
Managing messages typically involves either moving the messages to a folder or deleting them. To herd your messages into folders, you have the following options:
With Spotlight search, you can quickly and easily search through a bunch of messages to find the one you want to read — such as that can’t-miss stock tip from your broker. In the search box at the top of a mailbox preview pane, type stock or whichever search term seems relevant. All matching emails that have already been downloaded appear. And you can run a search to find words within the body of an email message from the Mail app. (For more on search, see Chapter 2.)
Search within Mail is quite powerful. For example, you can search by time frame by typing something along the lines of March meetings. Those search terms will find all the appropriate messages having to do with meetings that month. You can also search to find just flagged messages from your VIPs (flag unread VIP).
Via the iPad, you can also search just the current mailbox or across all your mailboxes. Just scroll to the top of the mailbox previews pane and tap either the All Inboxes tab or the tab for a given mailbox account. Then enter your search query in the box at the top of the preview pane.
If you’re using Exchange, iCloud, or certain IMAP-type email accounts, you may even be able to search messages stored on the server.
Your iPad can even receive email messages with attachments in a wide variety of popular file formats. (See the nearby sidebar “Keeping files in order” if you’re not sure what file formats are.) Which file formats does the iPad support? Glad you asked:
Here’s how to read a supported attachment:
Tap the attachment.
The attachment typically appears at the bottom of the message, so you might need to scroll down to see it.
In some cases, the attachment downloads to your iPad and opens automatically. In other instances, you may have to tap the button representing the attachment to download it.
Tap the attachment you’re reading (in the case of a document), and tap Done to return to the message text.
Or you can (again, for a document) open the Pages word processor if you’ve purchased it or downloaded it free if you bought a device with iOS 7, iOS 8, or iOS 9. You can also open the doc in certain other apps you may have. Incidentally, the documents you create in the Pages app are automatically saved to your iPad. With the latest version of Pages, you can also save a document to iCloud, where it can be made available automatically to the version of Pages for Mac computers. If you have a Windows PC, you can work with an iCloud version of Pages.
Later in this chapter, we show you a new way Apple cooked up in iOS 9 to help you send an attachment as part of an outgoing message.
Wait! You can do even more with your incoming email messages:
To see all recipients of a message: Tap More, which appears to the right of the recipients’ names, assuming you cannot already see all the names of the people receiving the message. You might see a number next to More, indicating the number of other people in the recipient list.
If all recipients are displayed, you’ll see Hide instead of More; tap Hide to hide all names except the sender’s.
If the link opens Safari, Contacts, or Maps and you want to return to your email, press the Home button on the front of your iPad and then tap the Mail icon. Or double-press the Home button and select the Mail icon from the gallery of running apps.
Sending email on your iPad is a breeze. You’ll encounter several subspecies of messages: pure text, text with a photo, a partially finished message (a draft) that you want to save and complete later, or a reply to an incoming message. You can also forward an incoming message to someone else — and in some instances print messages. The following sections examine these message types one at a time.
To compose a new email message, tap Mail on the Home screen. As before, what you see next depends on how you’re holding your iPad. In landscape mode, your email accounts or email folders are listed in a panel along the left side of the screen, with the actual message filling the larger window on the right.
Now, to create a message, follow these steps:
Tap the compose new message icon (labeled in Figure 5-6).
The New Message screen appears, like the one shown in Figure 5-11.
Type the names or email addresses of the recipients in the To field, or tap the + symbol to the right of the To field to choose a contact(s) from your iPad’s contacts list.
If you start typing an email address, email addresses that match what you typed appear in a list below the To or Cc field. If the correct one is in the list, tap it to use it.
As part of the more intelligent and proactive iOS 9 operating system, your iPad may suggest people that you typically include when starting to address a message.
(Optional) Tap the field labeled Cc/Bcc, From.
Doing so breaks the field into separate Cc, Bcc, and From fields (refer to Figure 5-11).
The Cc/Bcc label stands for carbon copy/blind carbon copy. Carbon copy (a throwback term from another era) is kind of an FYI to a recipient. It’s like saying, “We figure you’d appreciate knowing this, but you don’t need to respond.”
When using Bcc, you can include a recipient on the message, but other recipients can’t see that this recipient has been included. Bcc is great for those secret agent emails! Tap the respective Cc or Bcc field to type names. Or tap the + symbol that appears in those fields to add a contact.
In the subject field, type a subject.
The subject is optional, but it’s considered poor form to send an email message without one.
In the message area, type your message.
The message area is immediately below the Subject field. You have ample space to get your message across.
With iOS 8 or iOS 9, you can go with an optional third-party keyboard.
Tap the Send button in the upper-right corner of the screen.
Your message wings its way to its recipients almost immediately. If you aren’t in range of a Wi-Fi network or a cellular network when you tap Send, the message is sent the next time you’re in range of one of these networks.
One of the goodies in Mail is the capability to format email text by underlining, bolding, or italicizing it. First you select the text by pressing your finger against the screen until you see the options to select some or all of the text. After making your selection, you’ll have various other options: Cut, Copy, Paste, BIU, Replace, Define, Share, Quote Level, Insert Photo or Video, or Add Attachment. To format text, tap the BIU button. Then apply whichever style (bold, italics, underline) suits your fancy.
If you tap Quote Level — another option that appears when you tap the right-pointing arrow after selecting a word — you can quote a portion of a message you’re responding to. Note: Increase Quote Level must be turned on in Settings. You can also increase or decrease the indentation in your outgoing message.
If you tap Replace, you are provided with alternative word choices to the word that you selected. Tap one of the alternative options to select it.
If you tap Define, you can summon a definition from the New Oxford Dictionary or another available dictionary.
Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. When that’s the case, here’s how to send an email message with a photo attached:
Tap the Mail button.
An email message appears on-screen with the photo already attached. The image may appear to be embedded in the body of the message, but the recipient receives it as a regular email attachment.
On the Cc/Bcc line of your outgoing message, you see the size of the attached image. If you tap the size of the image shown, a new line appears, giving you the option to choose an alternative size among Small, Medium, Large, or Actual Size (in other words, keeping what you have). Your choice affects both the visible dimensions and file size of the photo (with the actual size of the file as measured in kilobytes or megabytes reported for each possible choice).
You have an alternative way of inserting pictures (or videos) into your outgoing mail messages. In the preceding “Formatting text in an email” section, we mention an Insert Photo or Video option that appears after you press your finger against the body of a message that you’re composing. Tap Insert Photo or Video, tap the album in which the photo (or video) you want to send exists, and then tap that photo or video. Tap Use to embed the image and proceed with composing.
You can also select among other options, depending on the apps you have installed on your iPad.
You can summon the Markup feature also when you receive a PDF or picture attachment. Tap on the attachment and then tap the briefcase icon, which appears in the lower-right corner.
Now that you’re in markup mode, you can draw on that image or PDF, tapping the simple annotation tools just below. The tools are represented by icons: one for a pen tool (unless you use an optional stylus, your finger will be that pen), one for a magnification loupe so that you can zoom in on the document or pic, one for writing text (you can summon the keyboard), and one for drawing your signature, which we get to in a moment.
If you draw a shape such as an arrow and the iPad recognizes that that was the shape you had in mind, it will give you the option to draw it for you. You can leave your own imperfect arrow (or other symbol) if you prefer to use that one instead of Apple’s. One piece of advice on that arrow business that we discovered: Draw with a single stroke and do not lift your finger.
Within Markup, you have the option to change the color and thickness of the lines and symbols that you draw.
Lastly, you can write your signature in script, a potential boon for lawyers or folks needing to get a John Hancock on a contract or lease. Just choose the fourth icon at the bottom of the Markup screen and tap Add or Remove Signature. Then tap the + and sign your name with your finger.
Sometimes you start an email message but don’t have time to finish it. When that happens, you can save it as a draft and finish it some other time. Here’s how:
Tap the Save Draft button if you want to save this message as a draft and complete it another time.
If you tap the Delete Draft button, the message disappears immediately without a second chance. Don’t tap Delete Draft unless you mean it.
To work on the message again, tap the Drafts mailbox. A list of all messages you saved as drafts appears. Tap the draft you want to work on, and it reappears on the screen. When you’re finished, you can tap Send to send it or tap Cancel to save it as a draft again.
When you receive a message and want to reply to it, open the message and then tap the reply icon (the curved arrow at the upper-right corner of the screen, as shown in Figure 5-12). Then tap Reply, Reply All, Forward, or Print, as described next:
To send your reply or forwarded message, tap the Send button as usual.
You can customize the mail you send and receive in lots of ways. In this section, we explore settings for sending email. Later in this chapter, we show you settings that affect the way you receive and read messages. In each instance, start by tapping Settings on the Home screen.
You can customize your mail in the following ways:
To hear an alert when you successfully send a message: From the main Settings screen, tap Sounds. Make sure that the Sent Mail setting is turned on. You’ll know because you’ll see a sound type listed (among alert sounds and ringtones), Swoosh by default. If you tap Sent Mail in Settings, you can select another sound besides Swoosh or choose None if going silent is your preference.
If you want to change other settings, tap the Sounds button at the top of the screen. If you’re finished setting the settings, tap the Home button on the front of your iPad.
No matter what setting you’ve just accessed, if you want to continue using Settings, tap whichever left-pointing button appears at the top of the right Settings pane — General, Mail, Contacts, or something else. After you return to the previous screen, you can change other settings. Similarly, you can tap the Home button on the front of your iPad when you’re finished setting any setting. That action always saves the changes you just made and returns to the Home screen.
This final discussion of Mail involves more settings that deal with your various email accounts.
Several settings affect the way you can check and view email. You might want to modify one or more, so we describe what they do and where to find them:
The last group of email settings we explore in this chapter deals with your email accounts. You most likely will never need most of these settings, but we’d be remiss if we didn’t at least mention them briefly. So here they are, whether you need ’em or not:
To stop using an email account: Tap the Settings icon on the Home screen; tap Mail, Contacts, Calendars ⇒ Account Name and flip the switch so that Mail is turned off. As a reminder, when Mail is on, you see green by the Mail switch. Otherwise, the switch is gray.
This setting doesn’t delete the account; it only hides it from view and stops it from sending or checking email until you turn it on again. (You can repeat this step to turn off calendars, contacts, reminders, and notes in a given account.)
To delete an email account: Tap the Settings icon on the Home screen; tap Mail, Contacts, Calendars ⇒ Account Name ⇒ Delete Account ⇒ Delete. Tap Cancel if you change your mind and don’t want your account blown away, or tap Delete to proceed.
Deleting an email account will also remove calendar entries, contact names, and notes from the given account.
You can find still more advanced Mail settings, reached the same way: Tap the Settings icon on the Home screen; tap Mail, Contacts, Calendars; and then tap the name of the account with which you want to work.
To choose whether drafts, sent messages, archived, and deleted messages are stored on your iPad or on your mail server: Tap Advanced and then choose the setting under Mailbox Behaviors Stored on My iPad or Stored on the Server. You can decide for drafts, sent messages, and trash. If you choose to store any or all of them on the server, you can’t see them unless you have an Internet connection (Wi-Fi or cellular). If you choose to store them on your iPad, they’re always available, even if you don’t have Internet access. Under Mailbox Behaviors, in certain circumstances, you also get to determine whether to delete or archive discarded messages.
We strongly recommend that you don’t change the next two items unless you know exactly what you’re doing and why. If you’re having problems with sending or receiving mail, start by contacting your ISP (Internet service provider), email provider, or corporate IT person or tech department. Then change these settings only if they tell you to. Again, these settings and exactly where and how they appear vary by account.
And that, as they say in baseball, retires the side. You’re now fully qualified to set up email accounts and send and receive email on your iPad. But, as the late Apple cofounder Steve Jobs was wont to say, there is one more thing …
The Messages app lets you exchange iMessages, pictures, contacts, videos, audio recordings, and locations with anyone using an Apple iDevice with iOS 5 or higher or with a Mac running OS X Mountain Lion, OS X Mavericks, OS X Yosemite, or OS X El Capitan. In the following sections, find out how each of the iMessages features works.
To start a new message, tap the Messages icon on the Home screen to launch the Messages app and then tap the compose new message icon, the little pencil-and-paper icon in the left pane of the screen (on the Messages list).
At this point, with the To field active and awaiting your input, you can do three things:
If the recipient is in your contacts list, type the first few letters of the name. A list of matching contacts appears. Scroll through it if necessary and tap the name of the contact.
The more letters you type, the shorter the list becomes. And after you’ve tapped the name of a contact, you can begin typing another name so that you can send this message to multiple recipients at once.
You have a fourth option if you want to compose the message first and address it later. Tap inside the text-entry field (the narrow rectangular area just above the keyboard and to the left of the Send button or microphone icon) to activate the field and then type or dictate your message. When you’ve finished typing, tap the To field and use one of the preceding techniques to address your message.
When you’ve finished addressing and composing, tap the Send button to send your message on its merry way. And that’s all there is to it.
The Messages app on your iPad is all-inclusive — that is, an iMessage need not be one to one. Instead, a group of folks can communicate. Start by preparing a message with a single recipient, and then tap the circled + in the To field to add people to the conversation from your contacts or manually.
With iOS 8 or iOS 9, you can record an audio message and send it along to a recipient. Apple calls this Tap to Talk and here’s how to take advantage of it. Press and hold down the microphone icon to the right of the text-entry field (not the microphone icon on the iPad keyboard) and start speaking. Your voice appears as a waveform at the bottom of the screen, as shown in Figure 5-14. When you’ve finished speaking, keep your finger pressed down and swipe up to send the message. You can listen to the audio before sending it by tapping the play icon, which appears after you release the button you held down to record. If you’re not thrilled with what you’ve just recorded, swipe left instead to cancel.
The recipient of your recorded iMessage will be able to tap a Play button to listen to what you had to say. But in some cases, he or she had best listen right away because you can set things (in Settings) so that audio messages expire after two minutes. Your only other option is for the message to never expire.
Keep in mind that the microphone icon that lets you record your voice will be enabled only if you’re sending an iMessage to a chat partner.
When determining your settings for receiving iMessages, first things first. Decide whether you want to hear an alert when you receive a message:
If you want to hear an alert sound when you receive a message: Tap the Settings icon on your Home screen, tap Sounds ⇒ Text Tone, and then tap an available sound. You can audition the sounds by tapping them. If you have a Mac, you can create your own text tones in GarageBand.
You hear the sounds when you audition them in the Settings app, even if the ring/silent switch is set to Silent. After you exit the Settings app, however, you won’t hear a sound when a message arrives if the ring/silent switch is set to Silent.
The following pointers explain what you can do with iMessages that you receive:
When your iPad is awake and unlocked: All or part of the message and the name of the sender appear at the top of the screen in front of whatever’s already there. If what’s already there is your Home screen, as shown in Figure 5-15, the Messages icon displays the number of unread messages.
These notifications are on by default; turn them off in the Settings app’s Notifications pane if you don’t care for them. You’ll also see any notifications for messages you’ve received in Notification Center.
To send a picture or video in a message, follow the instructions for sending a text message and then tap the camera icon to the left of the text-entry field at the bottom of the screen. You’ll then have the option of using an existing picture or video or taking a new one. You can also add text to photos or videos. When you’re finished, tap the Send button.
But just as you can send an audio message by using the Tap to Talk feature, you can record and send a video message through a similar shortcut. (And as with audio messages, go to Settings to make a video message go away after two minutes or to arrange so it doesn’t automatically expire.) To record a video message in this manner, press and hold down on the camera icon to the left of the text-entry box, and then tap the red video button that appears instead of the white photo button. Tap the button again after you have finished recording. If you’d rather take a still image, tap the photo button instead. Tap the circled x if you change your mind and don’t want to take a still image or capture video.
If you receive a picture or video in a message, it appears in a bubble just like text. Tap the play icon to play it right in Messages. Tap again to have the video take over the full screen.
In full-screen mode, tap the share icon in the upper-right corner of a received video or picture for additional options, such as sharing the image on Facebook or Twitter, assigning it to a contact, or more. If you don’t see the icon, tap the picture or video once, and the icon will magically appear.
Here are some more things you can do with messages:
Send Read Receipts to allow others to be notified when you have read their missives. Tap Settings ⇒ Messages, and slide the switch so that Send Read Receipts is on.
In iMessages, you can see when your own message has been delivered and read, and when the other person is readying a response.
Use a Bluetooth keyboard for typing instead of the on-screen keyboard. Follow the instructions in Chapter 15 to pair your Bluetooth keyboard with your iPad.
The Apple Wireless Keyboard ($69) works with the iPad and the iPhone. Find out more in Chapter 17.
And that’s all there is to it. You are now an official iMessage maven.
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