Mitchel Broussard, writing for MacRumors:

Popular music-detecting app Shazam today rolled out an update that adds support for the service within Messages, so users can send new artist and song discoveries directly to friends and family members.
[…]
The only user interface option within the Messages app for Shazam is “Touch to Shazam,” so whenever a song is playing nearby, allow the app to listen and once it does it’ll create a card to send to the current contact. The created message can be tapped on to jump into Shazam, buy the track on iTunes, or listen to it on Apple Music.

This is clever: if you’re in iMessage and want to share a song you’re listening to, you don’t have to go look for the Shazam app. Between iMessage and interactive notifications, I like what Shazam is doing with iOS 10.

With stickers coming to iMessage in iOS 10, Connie Chan has posted a great overview of stickers in WeChat and Line and why they’re more than glorified emoji:

Besides invisible messages, bigger and predictive emoji, full-screen effects, and movie/TV GIFs, Apple recently announced that stickers, too, are finally coming to its most popular app, iMessage. It’s no surprise that messaging is the company’s most popular app — if smartphones are like extensions of our fingers, then messaging is like touching people and things.

What is surprising — especially when compared to the more mature messaging ecosystem in Asia — is that many people still tend to treat stickers (i.e., the ability to easily incorporate pre-set images into texts) as just-for-fun frivolity, when they’re an important visual digital language fully capable of communicating a nuanced range of thoughts. For example, a single sticker could convey very different messages: “I’m so hungry I could collapse” or “I miss you” or “I’m sound asleep snoring”. Complex feelings, actions, punch lines, and memes are all possible with stickers.

(via Jeremy Burge’s excellent Emoji Wrap newsletter.)

I don’t usually cover concepts and mockups here at MacStories, but this idea by Michael Steeber is exactly what I’ve been wanting to see in Apple’s Messages app for a long time.

One of the best parts of these inline previews is that they aren’t limited just to the Messages app. The same previews could work in other Apple apps like Mail and Notes, or even in third party apps that support document-style text input. A feature like this, while subtle in implementation, has the potential to save a significant amount of time and remove points of friction in anyone’s workflow.

Steeber has come up with several ideas for inline previews, such as web links and Twitter, but also calendar invitations, documents, notes, and weather conditions.

Here’s what I wrote in my iOS 9 wishes in May:

Messaging services like Slack and Messenger have proven the utility of automatically generating previews for content shared in conversations such as direct links to images, tweets, or web articles. Considering Apple’s integration with Twitter and Safari’s Reader capabilities, I’m surprised they didn’t consider richer previews for content shared over iMessage before. Compared to the aforementioned messaging services, sharing links to web content on iMessage feels primitive, without the context granted by snippets of information embedded directly in a conversation. It’s time for a refresh.

As messaging continues to grow as an interface of its own, it only makes sense to make conversations faster and more contextual by using rich previews of what’s being shared. Considering that Apple is using open standards such as schema.org and Open Graph for rich results in iOS 9’s Search, they could use a similar system to build rich previews in Messages as well.