Attaching a photo or video to an SMS/MMS message is a fairly straight-forward task. You can either push a multimedia file to a new message from another app, such as directly from the Photo or Video app, or you can attach it directly from within a text message. The easiest way to do this is to tap the icon in the bottom-right corner of the screen to load up a photo selection screen, choose your desired folder and then photo, and tap the "Attach Photo" button. If you want to send a video, use the icons on the bottom of the screen to switch between photos and videos.

You will notice that once you start writing your message, the icon turns into a icon to send the message. If you want to attach a file after this, you don’t need to first delete your text to get the icon back. Instead, just swipe-down from the top-left of the screen to bring down the Messaging application drop-down menu and select "Attach File" and follow the same steps as above.

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Note that this only works on webOS 1.4.5 and below. This functionality appears to be disabled in webOS 2.0 and above

While searching for contacts in webOS is already an easy task using Universal Search and searching by a contact’s initials, it can get even easier by using a wildcard in your search. By substituting one or more "%" in the beginning or middle of a search as a wildcard, you can perform even more complex searches. For example, searching for "w%os" finds "WebOS Internals", but also other contacts with a "w" and then an "os" later in the name. And just as Universal Search looks in a person’s nickname and company name, these wildcards can also be used to search those, so searching for "%Experts" would return anyone with "Smartphone Experts" as their company. Unfortunately, it only appears to search for contacts within Universal Search, and not apps, but this functionality is usually somewhat consistent across the rest of webOS. Keep reading after the break to see how this differs in various areas of the OS.

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When you are sending a text message to a person in your contact list, you normally just search for that contact in the TO field on a new SMS message (or just use Universal Search). But what happens if you want to send a message to a number not in your contact list? Or what if you are given a name or word to send the message to, but don’t have a phone dialpad in front of you to know what number each character refers to (e.g. 2 = ABC, 3 = DEF, etc). Luckily, webOS gives you the flexibility to address the message almost any way you want.

• Dial by number: If you wanted to send a message to 123456789, you can just start typing the numbers of your keyboard without the need to press the Option (Orange/Silver) key beforehand. As you can see in the top of screenshot, typing "ertdfgcvb" (the 123456789 keys on the keyboard) gives you an option to "SEND TO NUMBER".
• Dial by word: Many companies, however, will often tell you to send a text message to a word, which requires you to have a old-school telephone dialpad in front of you to know how to do that conversion. For example, Coca-cola’s MyCokeRewards tells you to text a code to "COKE" (2653). Even though the dialpad isn’t available in the Messaging App to refer to, all you need to do is just type the word in the "TO" field and the conversion is done in the "SHORT CODE" section. As you can see in the screenshot, the Short code for "ertdfgcvb" converts to 378334928.

Note that you can not mix-and-match these methods. So, if you want to send a text to 1-555-PALM-200, you will actually need to do the PALM-to-7256 conversion on your own.
 

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Have you ever noticed that the contact avatar picture in the Messaging App sometime disappears and all you see is a transparent box like in the top conversation in the screenshot? This can occur when you have a active conversation with a contact who changes their profile pictures in one of your synced accounts (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn). Instead of showing the new picture, webOS will just show a empty box. Luckily, there is an easy fix for this without resorting to deleting the entire messaging thread.

1. Open up the conversation with the contact
2. Tap on the header bar of the conversation where you see the contact’s name. This will bring up the person’s Contact record within the messaging ap.
3. Tap on the person’s name again to unhide the listing of their linked accounts
4. Find the linked account with the picture you want to display and tap on that. A pop-up will appear with various options. Select "Set As Primary Profile" (even if this is already set as the Primary)
5. Back-swipe to go back to your messaging conversation
6. Back-swipe again to go back to your Conversations listing. You will now see that the contact’s picture is showing up properly.

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While webOS provides the ability to share the entirety of a single contact with others, what happens if you only want to share a phone number, email address or mailing address. For certain accounts (such as your Palm Profile or Google accounts), you can go into a Contract’s entry, click "Edit", highlight the data you need and copy it, but this is clearly not the most efficient way you can do this, right? In fact, for "read only" accounts like Facebook, you are not even able to select or highlight some data in a contact record. Instead, keep reading after the break to learn how you can more quickly get access to share this information

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Deleting a text message or IM conversation in the messaging app is accomplished the same way as you would delete a multitude of things throughout webOS: by swiping the message off the screen. However, there are a couple of unique aspects of deleting from within of the Messaging App:

• You can delete your entire messaging thread by swiping off a full conversation from the main top page of the Messaging App, but you can also delete individual messages from within a conversation.
• As discussed on a prior tip, you do have the ability to send a single text message to multiple recipients at once. If you individually delete one of those messages from within a conversation, it will actually delete it in all of the conversation threads for each recipient. However, if you delete the message as part of an entire conversation, no other threads will be affected and that message will remain in those conversations until you delete it!
• And don’t forget that while you must press "Delete" to confirm after you swipe it off the screen, if you have multiple items to delete you do not need to confirm each deletion. Just swipe off the next item and the prior action will automatically be confirmed.

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Patching in webOS land is one of those areas where we can definitively gleefully mock declare our superiority claim a win over our friends with Android and iOS devices. The hundreds of patches available in Preware, through our forums, and even through some simple coding of your own provide customization options most platforms don’t even offer. WebOS Internals’ newest code magician, Sconix, has been hard at work whipping up a new mega patch that consolidates the functions of multiple patches into one neat little package. Unlike the much-lauded Advanced Configuration for Launcher patch, the new Advanced Configuration for System Preferences patch touches multiple apps in a multitude of ways. So many ways, in fact, that you’re going to have to head past the break to check it out.

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Do you miss the ability to "tab" between fields using a D-Pad or would just like to be able to move between fields using the keyboard? You actually have this ability by pressing Shift () and Enter () at the same time, but note that this does not universally work throughout webOS. In fact, it appears to work only in some of the stock webOS apps, and only for text-entry fields (i.e. no drop-downs). Here are the apps that it does appear to work in:

• Messaging: When sending a new message, switches between the "To:" address bar and the "Enter message here…" area
• Email: When sending a new email, switches between the "To:" address bar (and the "CC:" and "BCC:" areas if shown), the "Subject", and the Body of the email.
• Calendar: When editing a calendar entry, switches between the "Name" of the event, "Event Location", and "Event notes"
• Tasks: When editing a task, switches between the "Name" of the task and "Task notes"
• Know of any other apps this will work in?

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Have you ever wondered how to highlight text within webOS? Depending on if you trying to highlight an editable text field or a block of text (e.g. from from a website or email), the process is slightly different.

• Editable text - You simple place/move the cursor to where you want the highlight to start, press the Shift key () and then drag your finger anywhere on the screen in the direction that you want to move the cursor. Note that you do not need to put your finger over the text you want to highlight, you just need to move it in the requested direction
• Non Editable Block of Text – To highlight text from a website or email, press the Shift key () and tap on the first paragraph that you want to highlight. While still pressing the Shift key, tap on the final paragraph that you want to highlight. If you want to highlight additional or fewer paragraphs, just keep pressing the Shift key and press on the paragraphs to add or remove.  Note that you can not currently highlight individual words or sentences, just entire paragraphs, and it has to be consecutive paragraphs.

Once you’ve highlighted the text you want, you can ‘Meta-Tap’ and hit C to copy or X to cut. A ‘Meta-Tap’ is holding your finger down on the gesture area.

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Have you ever received a text message or IM from a contact and wanted to quickly call that person back? Instead of searching for your contact with Universal Search, you have two quick options to get in touch with a contact directly from the Messaging app:

1. Click on the Contact Name banner on the top of the screen to load up the Contact record for the resource, and then click on appropriate method of communications (phone, email, SMS, IM).  Note that this action also works from within the Email application
2. Click on the button in the top-right corner (depending on your method of messaging, it may say TEXT, AIM, GOOGLE, etc), and then click on the Phone Icon () next to the number that you want to dial

Thanks to Thomas Coe for the tip suggestion

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