When Apple demoed the latest iPhones and iOS they showed someone doing a quick sketch and sending it to their friend as a text message. How do you do that?
I don’t recall that part of the demo for iOS 10 and the iPhone 7, but there is a feature that seems more like it’s designed for you to send a signature via iMessage on the iPhone, but it can certainly be used for sketches too if you can handle the small screen (at least on the phone). In fact, I’m surprised you haven’t bumped into it because the screen pops up any time you rotate your iPhone 90-degrees while it’s in iMessage!
What’s confusing is that this is completely separate from the section in the new iMessages where you can send a tap sequence or little doodle, making me wonder if there are different teams competing for the cool sketch app within iMessage!
Let me show you what I mean. To start, here I am texting with my daughter:
You would think that the sketch option is one of the features accessible by tapping on the grey “>” to the left of the input field, but when you tap on that, here’s what shows up:
The camera, the heart and access to applications (you do know that iOS 10 iMessage includes support for third party apps and games, right? There are already hundreds available!). Maybe the heart? A tap and it’s a bit mysterious what you can do, actually:
The finger swirls on the right show you can tap, hold your finger down for a heartbeat sequence or doodle. You got that from those images, right? 🙂
But that’s not the cool sketch screen! Go back to the main input by tapping in the text input field, then rotate your iPhone or iPad 90-degrees. Suddenly this shows up:
As you can see, there are pre-doodled phrases along the bottom, but it turns out you can use your finger to sketch out anything you’d like. I’ll do so with a bit of artistic lettering:
Looks pretty darn good for something sketched on a phone screen! A tap on “Done” and it’s ready to send (and yes, you’ll want to rotate your phone back 90-degrees to the vertical orientation):
I can add an additional text message, but let’s just send it with the blue up-arrow button.
And boom! It’s sent. Here’s what my daughter received on her iPhone:
Pretty cool, I’d say! And now you know how to do it and where all those mysterious iMessage apps are hiding too.