Apple announced some software updates Monday as part of its Worldwide Developers Conference in San Jose, which include the gamechanging new ability to edit and unsend texts in Messages after you've sent them.

Buried among some announcements from this morning's kickoff of the WWDC at the San Jose Convention Center is the earth-shaking revelation that you will soon be able to unsend that unkind message you drunkenly sent to your mom at 2 a.m. — assuming you have the wherewithal to do so before she wakes up and sees it.

Yes, a soon-to-arrive iOS update is going to finally give you the ability to yank back a text message, so long as it was sent between iPhones (blue text), via Messages (iMessage), and not via SMS (green). As reported by CNBC and The Verge, the new features will come with the next iOS update in a few months.

The example shown in the Apple demo above is a text between coworkers that appears to have a typo in it that was caused by a different Apple software feature, the dreaded Autocorrect. The example typo message is "Hey babe, can you forward me the meeting notes?", and the user then corrects it to say, "Hey Gabe, can you forward me the meeting notes?"

So now, when your phone corrects your intended message "I fucking hate Melanie's attitude today" to "I ducking hate Melanie's attitude today" and you press send too fast, you can quickly correct the AI-caused error.

The example message for the Undo Send feature is also funny: "Hi lamb chop, it's only been an hour and I miss you already. Luv you [kiss emoji]." Except this is mistakenly sent in a thread with a basketball buddy. Again, this is not the most likely real-world use of this feature, since we have all sent "It's only been an hour and I miss you already" texts to people after three too many gin and tonics, only to second-guess whether that new relationship is really ready for our clinginess.

Apple is adding a third new feature to Messages, which is "Mark unread," something derived from the world of email for those of us who want to mark a text unread so that we'll come back to it later. (The real question is, does it pull back a "Read" receipt when we don't want a friend to know we've seen their text?)

In other WWDC news, Apple is launching its own version of a buy-now-pay-later service, called Apple Pay Later. This means that Apple Pay is entering the fray of this line of fintech occupied by the likes of Affirm and Klarna, allowing users to buy big-ticket items and pay in installments — generally for a lower-than-credit-card-rates interest rate. The complete details of that were not shared.

These and more updates — including the ability to edit and customize one's iPhone lock screen — are coming with iOS 16, which is due for release sometime this fall, likely when Apple unveils the iPhone 14.

Top image via DamnYouAutocorrect.com

It's illegal to text while driving in California, yet that doesn't seem to deter the many people tap tap tapping away behind the wheel. With that in mind, Consumerist reports that safety regulators have proposed a technical solution — a "driver mode" for phones that restricts a device's use. Think "airplane mode," but potentially even more restrictive.

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration proposal, distracted driving resulted in 3,477 fatalities last year — an increase from the year before — and that most often the cause of the distraction was a cell phone. With NHTSA research showing that, on average, a person looks at a phone for 23 seconds for every text message sent it is clear that no matter how "good" someone is at multitasking they are still taking their eyes off the road every time they send that eggplant emoji.

"While NHTSA acknowledges that there are many available technology solutions, state laws, and consumer information campaigns designed to help reduce distracted driving," officials write, "the agency believes that an important way to help mitigate the real-world risk posed by driver distraction from portable devices is for these devices to have limited functionality and simplified interfaces when they are used by drivers while driving." In other words, people can't be trusted to follow the law.

And so what is to be done? NHTSA officials are hoping that phone manufactures like Apple and Samsung will build future phones with features that prevent drivers from doing the following:

• Displaying video not related to driving;
• Displaying certain graphical or photographic images;
• Displaying automatically scrolling text;
• Manual text entry for the purpose of text-based messaging, other communication, or internet browsing; and
• Displaying text for reading from books, periodical publications, web page content,
• social media content, text-based advertising and marketing, or text-based messages

Driver Mode would need to be manually turned on, like airplane mode, meaning that drivers could just ignore it — as some do with the current no-texting laws. However, in the future, officials hope that the mode can be automatic. Theoretically this would happen after a phone has been "paired" with a car, or when driver-detection technology is at a point that phones can automatically determine who is a driver and who is a passenger.

Until that time, however, just put down the damn phone.

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Last night's presidential debate being what it was, many of us took to our cellphones to vent and commiserate with friends and family. While you may simply have asked someone to pinch you or shoot you in the face, more likely than not, those text messages involved a lot of profanity — profanity that was only exacerbated by the fact that your iPhone repeatedly changed one of the most versatile words in the English language to some variation of "ducking."

Well, no more. In a shining example of what we in the biz call service journalism, here now is a way to get your phone to stop autocorrecting "fuck." Because, let's be real, when you want to type "fuck," you want to punctuate just how awful/cool/amazing something is — not to be reminded of the fact that Steve Jobs was a prude.

The "one easy trick," as it were, is quite simple, and was discovered by a journalist at the Guardian. "Best life hack ever," explained Steven Thrasher, "add 'fuck fucker' & 'fucked fucking' to your iPhone contacts & never mess with correcting 'duck' 'ducked' etc again."

That's right, he's suggesting you create a fictitious person in your contact list with the unfortunate name. Or, you could take the Cnet route and just rename an actual person in your contacts list.

Either way, you're now free to text profanities without being encumbered by the moment of reflection that comes along with fixing a lame iPhone autocorrect.

Related: Study: Frequent Texters Tend to Be Shallow, Wealth-Obsessed

Look everyone! A very scientific study from Canada has found that teens who text upwards of 100 times a day tend to be shallow, image-obsessed, and motivated by wealth. Also, they're probably terrible spellers.

The study from the University of Winnipeg suggests that these rabid texters are 30% less likely to feel strongly that leading an "ethical, principled life" is important to them. Also, they turned out to be a little more racist. The study uses data from an online survey completed by 2,300 first-year psychology students over the course of three consecutive years.

And the test, it seems, was inspired by the "shallowing hypothesis" first described by Nicholas Carr in his 2010 book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. Basically the idea is that heavy use of Twitter and texting for communication creates a world in which people only ever have rapid and fairly shallow thoughts, and superficial opinions. Of course the world has always been filled with shallow people, and superficial opinions, but have these new venues for expression made them more acceptable or something?

Anyway, it sounds vaguely technophobic, and clearly if you're texting over 100 times a day you probably don't have much time for book-learnin'. But wtvr. ttyl.

[CBC]
[Toronto Sun]

"Brainwash text world" by Demetrios Lyras.

Palo Alto Senator Joe Simitian, the man who authored the 2008 California ban on using cellphones while driving sans the use of a hands-free device, now wants a similar ban placed on cyclists texting or making phone calls. This means that, similar to drivers, cyclists pedaling while handling their iPhones or Droids or whatever could face a $20-$30 fine.

SFist talked to Jim Brown, Communications Director for the California Bicycle Coalition, who told us that the group was approached by Simitian with the hopes that the CBC would support the effort. "We told him that we continue to support his efforts to prevent distracted driving because we understood that that included cyclists." He went on to say that while a giant amount of research has suggested that cognitive impairment can result from phone use while driving, and that bicyclists aren't as impaired as drivers while using their mobile communication device of choice, "there's no evidence to suggest that [cyclists] are causing the same kind of damage." Which is to say, biking while cellphone-ing (ahem) is more of a danger to cyclists themselves than to pedestrians and drivers.

The fine is only a fraction of those faced by drivers (anywhere from $100-$120), "largely because additional local fees have not been added on to the citations," reports CBS 5.

Just a visual for you today, via last week's favorite meme-maker: Texts From Hillary.

Because we've developed an addiction to this little site called Texts From Last Night -- to which users submit the funny / insane texts they either sent, or received "last night," identified only by area code -- we decided to share the best recent posts from our hometown brothers and sisters in a semi-regular feature. Don't fret, 510 and 650: should your work prove worthy, we'll spotlight you at some point too.

(415): I've decided that I only have enough money to either eat or drink over the next month. I'm sure you know what choice I've made.

(415): just did a line in a complete hula outfit off a chick in a devil costume. do you think hell will be this good?

(415): Left my ID again and at a Giant's game. This is the second time they accepted my handgun safety certificate as proof of ID to buy beer.

(415): $4 taco and $400 parking ticket. i am not a cheap date.