No "you:" in Messages

[drumcat]

Has anyone else found it baffling that in Messages, you can see the last message, but you still cannot determine who the sender was without opening the conversation?

Every other application has some sort of modifier, like `you: messgetext`

Is there a reason? Am I missing something?

 

[Starfia]

I'm not sure I understand what you mean – I'm trying to think of a situation in Messages where you can't see the sender. (It occurs to me I don't use Messages for anything but one-on-one conversations; are you referring to notifications for groups specifically or something?)

 

[chabig]

Has anyone else found it baffling that in Messages, you can see the last message, but you still cannot determine who the sender was without opening the conversation?

I don't think that's a problem at all for me. If I cared, I'd open the conversation.

 

[ignatius345]

I'm not sure I understand what you mean – I'm trying to think of a situation in Messages where you can't see the sender. (It occurs to me I don't use Messages for anything but one-on-one conversations; are you referring to notifications for groups specifically or something?)

I think he means in the Messages overview screen where it shows a snippet of the last message sent or received. I personally don't find it particularly hard to remember whether the snippet is something I wrote or not -- and most likely if I'm thinking about the conversation at all I'm probably opening it up anyway.

 

[drumcat]

Here's something from Teams, as an example. Group messages give the last respondent's name. If I were the last to write, I get `You:` tagged on the front. It's normal. I can't think of anything other than Messages that doesn't do this.

 

[Starfia]

ignatius345 and drumcat – I see. I suppose for group messages that might be difficult, and for one-on-one messages, I guess you're right that you have to recall whether the sender of the most recent message was you or the other person. I've used Messages since the first version of iChat and that had honestly never occurred to me, let alone bothered me.

Some updates for the next major version of Messages, it looks like: for pinned one-on-one conversations, an indicator shows whether the other person spoke last. For pinned group messages, the profile image for the most recent speaker overlaps the image representing the conversation.