On this week’s Amplified, Jim and Shawn talk about the new iPad Air 2, the iPad mini 3 and does Apple offer too many iPads for sale?
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Pixelmator for iPad is a powerful image editor that gives you everything you need to create, edit, and enhance your images. It lets you work seamlessly between Mac and iPad and even work effortlessly with Photoshop images. Packed with powerful creative tools and engineered to harness the full iOS and 64-bit architecture power, Pixelmator for iPad is a real image editor right at your fingertips.
There’s a major battle brewing in the payments industry. On one side, Apple Pay sits on top of the existing credit card model, adding a layer of anonymizing security and ease of use.
On the other side is CurrentC, the brainchild of a consortium called the Merchant Customer Exchange, or MCX. CurrentC seeks to eliminate the credit card companies, and their fees, from the system. CurrentC is an alternative to credit cards, not an add-on.
There are several core issues here.
First, there’s the mechanics of the system. With Apple Pay, you place your phone near an NFC sensor, then touch TouchID to validate the purchase. With CurrentC, you first have to unlock your phone, launch the CurrentC app, wait for it to generate a QR code which you place in front of the scanner. You then enter a pin code to complete the process.
In stores, Apple Pay requires an iPhone 6 or 6 Plus and a merchant with an NFC terminal. CurrentC won’t be available before next year, but will work with existing merchant equipment, whereas Apple Pay will require merchants that don’t have the proper terminals to upgrade.
Both Apple Pay and CurrentC are backed by powerful market forces. Apple Pay is backed by Apple, of course, as well as most banks and credit card companies and a long list of merchants. CurrentC is opposed by the credit card companies, since the goal of the Merchant Customer Exchange is to completely eliminate credit card swiping fees from the equation. According the New York Times, the Merchant Customer Exchange represents more than a trillion dollars in sales which, if my math is right, would eliminate more than $20 billion in credit card fees.
Those savings are certainly a big motivation. Another is the loss of customer data. Apple Pay is, in some respects, anonymous. From Bloomberg:
Here’s what Panera ultimately wants from its participation in any mobile-payments system: a speedier link to the MyPanera Rewards loyalty program, which is used in half of all purchases. When a customer pays now, she either hands over her loyalty card or tells the cashier her phone number. Mobile payments should be able remove that step.
Apple Pay, with its built-in anonymity, won’t eliminate the need to swipe a loyalty card or give the cashier a phone number. ”Obviously, that’s not where we want to be,” says Blaine Hurst, Panera’s executive vice president for technology and transformation. “Why can’t I just walk up to a cashier with my phone and all that information magically appears?”
Harvesting customer data is a two edged sword, with privacy concerns on one side, and loyalty benefits, more focused service on the other. Apple Pay does not prevent the use of loyalty cards and the like, but it does not build that data in. If Apple can find a way to allow the customer to fold that information in to the Apple Pay stream if they choose to, that will eliminate that issue.
I broke my wrist. Makes typing a bit of a challenge. Slow going for the next week or so. Just saying.
This is Colossal:
Hikers exploring England’s Derbyshire Peak District earlier this week stumbled onto a rare phenomenon caused by extreme winds.
Really wild looking video but, if it’s that windy, maybe you should be careful about walking on the slippery rocks.
Ars Technica:
Sometimes the end of funding is the beginning of a slide into radio silence, which ultimately turns into few or no backer orders fulfilled, and no satisfactory explanation for why the project didn’t pan out according to the orderly delivery schedule the creators promised.A project can go off the rails and fail even after its funding succeeds for a number of reasons. There can be unforeseen costs, or design problems, or a team member quits or fails to deliver their part of the project. Often, when a project skids to a halt, the final updates are obscured from the public and sent only to backers, which may be part of the reason failures are often not well-publicized. Occasionally, backers who receive them pass them on or post them publicly on forums, which is as good as it gets in terms of letting the outside world know a project did not ultimately pan out.
I’ve been burned by a few Kickstarter-type campaigns. Rule of thumb is to assume the money you are handing over is a donation – if you get something in return, great but don’t hold out a lot of hope. Granted, the majority of Kickstarters complete successfully but there are still plenty that don’t. Caveat Emptor.
Mosaic Science:
Meet the donors, patients, doctors and scientists involved in the complex global network of rare – and very rare – blood. In 50 years, researchers have turned up only 40 or so other people on the planet with the same precious, life-saving blood in their veins.
Fascinating story of how rare blood develops and the issues involved in having such an incredibly rare blood type.
The Verge:
a significant number of merchants, including heavyweights like Walmart, Kmart, 7-Eleven, and Best Buy, are in outright competition with Apple Pay. The retailers, through a joint venture formed in 2012, are building their own mobile payment app, called CurrentC. It’s expected to launch next year. In the meantime, these retailers have no intention to support Apple Pay.
There may be a lot of good reasons to not support Apple Pay and there may be good alternatives available now and in the future but CurrentC – which needs access to your checking account – and QR codes is not either of those things.
PetaPixel:
Normally Camera+ would set you back $3 in the app store, but right now there’s a lesser-known promotional offering from Apple that lets you download a copy for free. You just need to know where to look.
Well worth jumping through some hoops to get it.
Huffington Post:
Manganese black. Yellow ocher. Vermilion. Ultramarine. These pigments sound delicious. Their names are so sharp and elegant, it’s as if the terms emote more meaning than just color. We can smell logwood, taste cochineal, touch mummy brown. There is just something (quite scientifically) alluring about a perfectly saturated glob of paint or an electric mound of powdered hues, especially when its name is so tantalizing.The uniqueness of the names undoubtedly prompts those amongst us, who obsess over the various pink, purples and blues, to wonder where the terms come from. We learn the origin stories of famous paintings in art history course after art history course, but it’s rare to read about the birth of Madder red or mauve. How did the colors in Vincent van Gogh’s “Irises” or J.M.W. Turner’s “Modern Rome” come to be?
I never really thought about it but of course it’s true; these artists had to make their own paint and would of course create their own colors too.
Glenn Fleishman talks through the changes Yosemite brings to Wi-Fi. To start off, hold down the option key and click on the Wi-Fi icon in the menu bar. More detail, right? Some of that is pre-Yosemite, some new to Yosemite. Now hover over a network name and check out the tooltip that appears.
Lots of great detail here.
If you have a need for vector artwork of all shipping iOS devices, this free collection from Robbie Pearce might be your answer. The files are done in Sketch and come in every color you can buy.
Re/code put together a review team of four people, two on the east coast, two on the west coast, to put Apple Pay through its paces.
Our overall conclusion: Apple Pay worked smoothly and quickly in all but a very few instances. But the number of physical and online stores that accept it at launch is still very small. Plus, some common things slow it down, like the need for signatures and debit-card PINs in some stores, its lack of support for loyalty cards, and cashier confusion. So it’s far from a complete replacement for your wallet and credit card, at least not yet.
This simplistic conclusion is only skin deep. The real value of the review is watching Apple Pay at work, with a separate video for each team member. To get you started, here’s Katie Boehret from Washington, D.C.
Air New Zealand:
As the official airline of Middle-earth, Air New Zealand has gone all out to celebrate the third and final film in The Hobbit Trilogy – The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
It very well may be the most expensive aircraft safety video ever made. And interesting to see some of the difference between the demonstrations we see on North American Airlines. But I’m sorry – I don’t believe for a second that Elijah Wood flies Coach.
Pixelmator for iPad is a powerful image editor that gives you everything you need to create, edit, and enhance your images. It lets you work seamlessly between Mac and iPad and even work effortlessly with Photoshop images. Packed with powerful creative tools and engineered to harness the full iOS and 64-bit architecture power, Pixelmator for iPad is a real image editor right at your fingertips.
That’s a lot of money for a few bits of wood, plastic and metal but it is fair to say that while $905,000 (£563,904) is a lot of money, the Apple 1’s place in the pantheon of IT history, alongside that of its designer Steve Wozniak, should be somewhere very close to the front.
According to the auctioneers the Apple 1 was expected to sell for between $300,000 and $500,000 before the Henry Ford Museum of Dearborn, Michigan, stepped in to buy it.
Fascinating to watch the Apple I become such a collectors item.
MasterCard expanded its Priceless Surprises advertising series with two news ads. This first one debuted during Game 1 of the World Series:
That baseball legend is George Brett, an all time great and one loyal guy. He’s been working for the Kansas City Royals all of his adult life (since 1971).
The second spot debuted last night, during Game 2, and features Mariano Rivera, a legend in his own right:
Interesting that MasterCard included Tommy Lasorda in the ad’s title (thanks to Kip Beatty for pointing that out in comments). I wonder if he was originally slated to be in this spot or, perhaps, if we’ll see Tommy (who just turned 87!!!) in a Game 3 ad.
When I first read this Uber blog post, I thought it was a joke. Imagine calling a taxi, then having the driver offer to give you a flu shot, sort of a two-for-one deal.
But Uber is serious about this. They’ve teamed up with Vaccine Finder and will either bring a registered nurse to you or bring you to a clinic for a flu shot, all for free. This effort is today only and limited to Boston, New York and DC.
Here’s the details:
• Every component of UberHEALTH is offered at no cost
• All vaccinations (appropriate for ages 4 and up) will be administered by a registered nurse through Passport Health & Pager.
• All consent information and paperwork stays between the recipient and them.
• If you or your friends choose to be vaccinated, please arrange for a suitable indoor environment before your nurse arrive
• Maximum of 1 flu prevention pack & 10 flu shots per request
• We expect demand for UberHEALTH to be high, so your patience is appreciated
I love the idea, hope it works well.
Benjamin Mayo digs in to the Pixelmator image editor, which was shown off by Apple when they rolled out the new iPads. If you are even a little curious about Pixelmator, take a few minutes to read the review. Benjamin does a good job exploring the interface and walking through the image adjustment workflow.
James Dempsey is just a regular guy, a Mac and iOS developer who worked at Apple for about 15 years, toiling away on OS X releases Leopard through Lion, the Cocoa frameworks team, and Aperture.
Dempsey is also a songwriter, writing songs with a focus on development, with titles such as Model View Controller and Gonna Needa Pasteboard. Back in 2001, James got the chance to perform a song at WWDC that was received well enough that a yearly tradition was born. His band, James Dempsey and the Breakpoints has been spooning out these developer novelty songs ever since.
And now the band has hit the big time, debuting at number 5 on the Billboard Comedy Chart. That’s no small thing. That’s one spot below Patton Oswalt but several notches above Sarah Silverman and Louis C. K. Not bad for a Mac and iOS developer.
Here’s a link to the album, called Backtrace. Congratulations all around.
Thanks to my friend Sly for sending me this video and thanks to the American hockey fans who honoured all Canadians by singing our National Anthem and showing their respect on this awful day. Tears and chills.
This is just delicious. If you want to jump right to the image, click here. Boy has Apple come a long way.
Last month, Austin Mann took the iPhone 5s, 6 and 6 Plus on a test drive on location in Iceland. Since then, he’s incorporated Yosemite into his workflow. This post is his tips and tricks and lessons learned.
A must read for photographers, but well worth your time, even if the most you do is take the occasional snapshot.
Ben Bradlee was a towering figure on journalism, guiding the Washington Post as it challenged the US federal government over the right to publish the Pentagon Papers and was a driving force in uncovering the Watergate scandal that ultimately unseated US President Richard M Nixon.
From Seeking Alpha (free reg-wall):
Tim Cook was pleased to announce that in FY2014, Apple sold 250 million iOS devices. That means that since 2007, Apple has sold over 950 million iOS devices in total and is on track to sell it’s billionth iOS device sometime in Q12015. The only other platforms to ever reach the billion milestone are Windows, Facebook, and Android. This is a significant milestone and unlike with Facebook, the billion dollar figure does not suggest the same penetration as Android or iOS, since the latter two act more as an annuity, where consumers purchase upgrades in rather regular cycles.
I remember thinking, when the iPhone was first announced, what an accomplishment it would be if Apple could sell 10 million of them. A billion iOS devices is simply astonishing.
Interesting point about the relative achievements of a billion Facebook accounts versus a billion iOS devices. Certainly fair to say that a billion Facebook accounts is the harder of the two, requiring deeper market penetration. On the other hand, it does say something that Apple has a lot of repeat customers and requires them to survive. With Facebook, if you’ve ever had an account (as long as you don’t delete it), that number counts, even if you no longer use the service.
It was bound to happen eventually. A perfect storm of consumer anticipation, a new album ready for release, and the complexity of the digital music construction process.
Taylor Swift had a new album in the hopper, ready to go, and somehow 8 seconds of white noise slipped into the mix known simply as “Track 3”. Fans being the fanatics they are, the hive mind crowd-tapped that track to number one on the Canadian iTunes charts. For obvious reasons, the track has since been removed. Collector’s item?
This tweet said it best. Heh. (hat tip to Stu Mark)
I picked up my new iPads after the event in Cupertino ended last Thursday where Apple introduced the new products. I’ve been using the new iPads just as I have used the previous generation devices, so I could get a good idea how they function under my normal working conditions.
The best feature to ever come to an iPad is Touch ID. I’ve spent the last year holding my finger on the iPad’s Home button, waiting for it to unlock, and cursing when I realized what I was doing. It’s been a long year.
Touch ID is more than a convenience feature—it actually helps the user with security too. Without Touch ID, passcodes to unlock the iPad are typically very simple, allowing people easy, quick access to the iPad. After all, if it becomes too much of a pain to just get the device open, we’ll either not use it or disable security altogether. Neither one of those options really work.
Touch ID solves this problem by allowing you to add a secure password, while giving easy access to the iPad using your fingerprint. Apple is also giving developers access to Touch ID so you can unlock apps, like 1Password, with your fingerprint.
So, yes there is a measure of convenience that you can enjoy after setting up Touch ID, but you should also take the opportunity to secure your device.
One of the things I use my iPad Air 2 for is music. I plug in my guitar to the iPad and use one of the many great music apps out there for amp modeling. For me, this is a solid test of the iPad because you are processing audio in real-time—if there’s any problem with the processor it should show up when trying to work with live audio.
There were no problems at all with the iPad Air 2 or the iPad mini 3.
I plugged my Les Paul into a Line 6 SonicPort, which goes into the iPad via the lightning connector, and then to BIAS, the amp modeling software. So when I strum a chord on the guitar, I should hear sound immediately—any delay is called latency and really messes with your ability to play or record. I experienced no latency with either iPad in my tests.
To be honest, I’m not really surprised I didn’t have any problems. When I saw the Pixelmator guys demoing Pixelmator for iPad during the event last week, I knew this was a powerful device—that was a really impressive demo that had everyone in the crowd clapping.
The iPad Air 2 is thinner than its predecessor and while it’s only by a little bit, it does make a difference. The hardware design is slightly different and when combined with the thinness, the iPad Air 2 feels very comfortable to hold and use.
There is one really odd thing that I found when using the new iPads. Since I started using the iPhone 6, I got used to pressing the sleep button on the side of the device. Now, I’m doing that on the iPad, except the iPad’s sleep button is still on the top—it hasn’t changed. Instead of putting the iPad to sleep, I turn up the volume.
It’s a small thing, I know, but it’s an annoying lack of consistency across the product lines. I almost feel like the Sleep button will become my new nemesis now that the iPad has Touch ID.
Of course there is more to the new iPads than hardware—iOS 8.1 was also released bring deeper integration between OS X Yosemite and iOS. My two favorite features are Instant Hotspot and Handoff.
I had a few problems setting up Instant Hotspot, which is odd because it’s not supposed to need any configuration, but yet it didn’t work reliably for me. I mean that it didn’t show up consistently in the “Personal Hotspot” space under the Mac’s Wi-Fi menu. What’s even stranger is that it acted differently uses two different Macs—on one the hotspots showed up like they used to, as a regular Wi-Fi network.
Whatever was causing the problem fixed itself because as of tonight, it’s working perfectly. I could easily chalk this one up to user error, but it does bother me that I don’t know why it didn’t show up properly.
Handoff is a brilliant idea. It allows you to start your work on one device, and then pick it up on another just by choosing the app. All of the work magically appears on your new device and you just keep working.
Like Instant Hotspot, Handoff is a feature that I’ll be using a lot.
I said on Amplified last week that if all Apple did to the iPad was add Touch ID, I’d be happy—that’s what they did with the iPad mini, and to be honest, I’m happy. They did much more than that to the iPad Air 2 and it’s working perfectly for me.
I will continue using both iPads because they both have a place in my lifestyle and workflow. At the end of the day, I still use the iPad Air for the larger screen, while I use the iPad mini when I go out for a coffee and need to be a bit more portable. That’s not going to change any time soon.
The iPad created and made popular a market for powerful, portable tablets. The latest updates, along with iOS 8.1 and the App Store ecosystem, only solidifies Apple’s position as the No. 1 tablet-maker in the world.
Digg:
A nicely crafted beer is a thing of beauty, but if you’re pouring it into just any old grimy pint glass, you’re not letting that brew reach its true potential. The right glass is key to getting every last boozy drop of pleasure.
A lot of people don’t realize that the shape of the glass you drink your beer out of can affect the way it tastes. In general, beer glasses are designed to enhance the kinds of beers inside. Always drives me nuts when I go to a bar and ask for a specialized beer and it comes in the “wrong” glass.
Just no words to describe this video. It’s incredibly creepy, yet compelling. Amazing CGI work.
Yup, it’s China Unicom, the second largest mobile carrier in China. Because marketing.