A telegram informs us that the twelfth update of the year has arrived through the official blog, and it is certainly not one of the trivial ones. Users can take advantage of a long series of innovations starting from reactions to messages – already spotted a few days ago – passing from automatic translation for those in other languages, from themed QR codes to the possibility of hiding parts of a text, to avoid any spoiler.
The reactions are not unprecedented, of course, but Telegram has chosen to bring them to its app in a personal way, accompanied by some dedicated animations. You can send a quick reaction, such as a thumbs-up, or select one of the available ones. They will always be active in private chats, while in groups and channels, it will be at the discretion of the administrators whether to make them available or not. How reactions to messages on Telegram work, using a beta version for iOS. In short, at present:
- you can choose from 11 reactions
- when used in groups, reactions indicate the name of who sent them
- it is possible to disable the reactions in the channels or groups or only allow the use of some of them
- sending a reaction is accompanied by a captivating animation
The option that allows you to hide a part of the text does not require big introductions: it happens to everyone who wants to talk about a movie or a TV series that maybe only someone in a group of friends has already watched, and to be able to hide a portion of what is written is quite useful to avoid creating enemies. From now on, it will be possible to do this simply by selecting the words you want to hide, then pressing on the relative option to activate the function. The hidden text will not even be seen in the preview of the chat list and the notifications.
Telegram also adds a new button that, after selecting a message, allows you to see its automatic translation. From the options, you can choose which language to read the translated text, and it is also possible to exclude all those languages you are fluent in so as not to see the “Translate” option appear. A handful of extra features have also been introduced with the update, as reported at the beginning. Personalized QR codes allow you to customize the look of any QR that points to a public contact, group, channel, or bot you want to share.
There are also interactive versions of some of the most used emoticons, available only in 1 to 1 chat. And finally, Mac users will have newly redesigned context menus. At present, it is not possible to determine when this feature will be made available to the general public. The information is taken from the beta version for iOS, but it is easy to predict that when the works have reached a mature stage, the developers will not neglect the Android user. It must be said that, even if WhatsApp has yet to introduce a similar function, other popular messaging apps have foreseen it for some time, think of Facebook Messenger and Apple’s iMessage.
No shocking or unprecedented features, therefore, but a welcome effort to make a platform more and more complete than, for the rest, continue to face its competitors on an equal footing. In short, many small and big news stories make the wishes for the new year more fun and have a greater range of options to express yourself. The update has already been available for a few minutes, so you can run to download it and start trying the additions.