Turn yourself into a WhatsApp texting pro

WhatsApp often sneakily delivers new features. Their latest update brings a colloction of useful features that you need to known about, including disabling read receipts at last. Stuff.tv educates you on the features hiding in the nooks and crannies of WhatsApp. You can thank us for our intrepid sleuthing later. As usual, we’ll take credit, not cash.
Star messages for easy reference: Sometimes you get important messages in your WhatsApp chats like the address of the restaurant you’re supposed to meet your friends at but it gets lost in all the digital chatter. When dinner time rolls around, you try to scroll through your 352 frivolous messages to find that one message that matters. With WhatsApp’s latest update, there’s now a way to bookmark certain messages for easy locating.
How: Double tap on any message and tap on the star icon to mark it. To find it again, all you have to do is tap on the chat’s name, and tap on Starred Messages to see all the messages you’ve marked out.
To see conversation context, just tap on the arrow next to it and you’ll be brought back to the exact place in the chat.
When you’re done with it, just double tap the message, hit the star icon again to unstar it. It’s only available for iOS users for now, so fandroids, wait your turn.
Instantly add dates to your calendar: It’s easy to forget appointments when you’re a busy bee.
You make vague plans for drinks, settling on a date but promptly forget about it as the conversation rolls on.
This handy little shortcut makes sure you commit to an appointment.
How: Just state a date and you get an automatic link to add it to your calendar.
It also recognizes words like ‘today’, ‘tomorrow’ and days. But it would be best to use specific dates, just in case you get the day wrong. No more excuses for forgetting drink dates anymore. At least, not for iOS users. Android users still have a little time before the update happens.
Use WhatsApp on the Web: WhatsApp Web is the best creation since ... WhatsApp itself.
It’s not an entire new feature as Android users have been enjoying it for a while, and rubbing it in the faces of those on iOS. Guess what, their gloating days are over, as the feature has been quietly rolled out to iOS, too.
How: To enable inconspicuous chatting on the web as you do your work, all you have to do is go to Settings, tap on WhatsApp Web. Then head to web.whatsapp.com on your computer and scan the QR code that appears using your phone. Commence chatting on the sly without downloading anything. Genius.
Save date on calls: Making calls via WhatsApp is a real convenient feature. But what’s not so great about it is the fact that it consumes a lot of data. Thankfully WhatsApp has a new setting to help those of us with data shortage problems.
How: Pop into Settings then Chats and Calls. Right at the bottom, you’ll find Low Data Usage. Turn that on to decrease the amount of data used during calls made via WhatsApp. We’d still use WhatsApp calls sparingly though if you’re on a real limited data plan to ration data for specific uses like ... watching very important puppy videos.
Locate group chat: For those with too many chats to keep track of, this next trick is for you.
Bet you didn’t know you can find old group chats by checking with individuals. This is useful for when you want to revisit old topics and you can’t remember where to find them.
Chances are you’ll remember who was in the chat, more than what the chat was.
How: Just tap on any individual chats, and tap their name for more information. From there you’ll be able to see all the groups you have in common with said individual, even if they go way back, which makes for an easier way of finding what you were looking for.
Backing up videos: WhatsApp is almost like a digital diary of everything that’s happened for as long as you’ve been using it. There’s probably few other apps that you use as regularly as it.
It used to be that you could only backup images in your chats, but not videos. Now that’s changed.
How: Get into Settings, then Chats and Calls, and pop into Chat Backup. This is the control center for backing up your wordy memories.
You can choose when you want Auto Backup to happen (but make sure you disable backing up using data within your phone’s settings or there will be hell to pay). And now, you can also choose to not leave videos out in your backup by toggling Include Videos (duh).
Would it be greedy of us to ask for voice messages to be included in the next update too?
(To be continued next week)