I’m very glad Apple’s Messages team somehow snuck this one little button past the corporate bureaucracy (Apple infamously likes to pretend their software is infallible and therefore doesn’t need things like useful error messages or rectification tools).

It’s of course not great that iMessages don’t reliably sync between Apple devices to begin with, but at least there’s a simple way to fix that when it occurs.

In case you’re unfamiliar with it, this button is in the “iMessage” tab of the Messages Settings – although placed dangerously close to the “Sign Out” button. 🤨

Even so, there are things which just scream “I’m actually an iOS app”, like when you right-click a message or attachment while the Messages window is on a secondary display, and the contextual menu appears in the top-left corner of the main display. And disappears when you click on any item in it, without activating the item. Because it’s reacting to the mouse location as if it were in the correct place on the secondary display. But if you click on the secondary display, it just dismisses the pop-up menu without activating the selected item – I don’t know how they managed to get that discontinuity between mouse move events and mouse down events, but there you go, the miracle that is Catalyst.

Sigh.

Also, keyboard navigation doesn’t work correctly in the contextual menu – it’s fine for the plain text items, but it’s impossible to select any of the reactions.

Fortunately, for reactions specifically, there’s a workaround! ⌘T brings up a special contextual menu just for reactions, and you can then just hit a number key, from 1 through 6, to apply the corresponding reaction. It only works on the most recently received message in the selected conversation, but then that’s usually the one you want.

Of course, the GUI for that special contextual menu is ripped directly out of iOS, further emphasising Message’s unnatural nature.