Apple Reportedly Looking into Peer to Peer Payments Powered by Apple Pay ⇢

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Jason Del Ray:

Apple’s on-again, off-again flirtation with building its own money-transfer service appears to be back on.

The company has recently held discussions with payments industry partners about introducing its own Venmo competitor, according to multiple sources familiar with the talks. The service would allow iPhone owners to send money digitally to other iPhone owners, these people said.

I’d love to see this. I currently use Square Cash for stuff like this, but something better-integrated into iOS would be a big win.

Liftoff #45: Interested in Looking Awesome ⇢

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On this week’s Liftoff:

We discuss Cassini’s daring death dives inside Saturn’s rings before the end of its mission, exciting news from our solar system’s ocean moons and hints of a change in planning for future exploration of Mars.

My thanks to our sponsors:

  • Blue Apron: A better way to cook. Get three meals free with your first purchase, and free shipping.
  • Casper: Because everyone deserves a great night sleep. Get $50 off with the code ‘LIFTOFF’

Amazon Announces Echo Look ⇢

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Amazon has a new Echo out today, as Dan Moren explains:

In addition to all the usual Alexa features, you can tell the Echo Look to take a photo or a video, and the result will pop up in the Echo Look companion app on your phone, letting you tell whether the outfit you’ve got on works. A depth of field effect—à la the iPhone 7 Plus’s Portrait Mode—blurs the background and brings you and your outfit into the foreground. Short videos let you spin around to see yourself from all angles.

There are a couple other related features in the Look: one is the ability to build a lookbook that lets you scroll back through a log of all the outfits you’ve worn and snapped pictures of, letting you find favorites, dispose of ones you don’t wear much, and, I guess help make sure you don’t wear the same thing every day? The other is a more interactive Style Check, which Amazon says combines machine learning with advice from fashion specialists: snap photos of yourself in two different outfits, submit them, and you’ll get advice as to which works better based on fit, current trends, and more. (As with many machine learning algorithms, it supposedly gets better the more you use it.)

I wear jeans, podcast t-shirts and Chuck Taylors every day of my life,1 so this $199 Echo isn’t for me.

However, I find it super interesting that Amazon has launched an assistant product with a very specific set of tools onboard. Up until this point, Siri, Google Assistant and Alexa have been extremely broad in their use cases.

  1. For the 60 days a year when it is cold in Memphis, I have a wide range of gray and black hoodies. ↩

‘Today at Apple’ to Bring New Retail Experience to all Apple Stores ⇢

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This morning, Apple announced “Today at Apple,” a new push to roll out a new experience to all 495 Apple stores:

Apple today announced plans to launch dozens of new educational sessions next month in all 495 Apple stores ranging in topics from photo and video to music, coding, art and design and more. The hands-on sessions, collectively called “Today at Apple,” will be led by highly-trained team members, and in select cities world-class artists, photographers and musicians, teaching sessions from basics and how-to lessons to professional-level programs.

The new program offers more than 60 different sessions, including photo walks, hands-on projects for kids, coding sessions, lessons on pro apps and more.

In an interview with CBS, Apple’s SVP of Retail Angela Ahrendts said:

So we call the software of the store that we are launching the end of May – we call that Today at Apple.

That “software” will roll out across Apple’s nearly 500 stores, many of which will be changed literally overnight. Ahrendts calls it all an effort to create “town squares” where customers engage with their devices and their communities.

A lot of the big online guys have said they’re opening stores. Amazon’s investing in stores. Google’s investing in stores. … Starbucks figured it out, you know? Being a gathering place for – right? ‘Meet me at Starbucks,”’ Ahrendts said. “And you know, I’ve told the teams, “I’ll know we’ve done a really, really great job if the next generation, if Gen Z says, ‘Meet me at Apple. Did you see what’s going on at Apple today?'”

Apple stores have had training and one-off events for years, but this is a more focused effort in turning Apple stores into community hubs. To facilitate them, stores that have not been updated to the new design will receive upgraded AV equipment as needed.

While I’m the first person to complain that Apple stores are already often too busy and sometimes under-staffed, I can see what the company is trying to do here, and I applaud it. The Apple store should be a hub for those in the Mac and iOS community, and serve to educate and inspire Apple’s customers.

Connected #139: Artisanally-Raised, Hand-Crafted Yaks ⇢

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On this week’s Connected:

Casey Liss comes to set Federico straight about Plex in a new segment called Follow-on. Then, Stephen and Federico talk about Apple’s recent environmental push, the changes coming to the iTunes Affiliate Program and AppStories, Federico’s new podcast and website.

My thanks to our sponsors:

  • Incapsula: Secure and accelerate your website. Connected listeners get one month free.
  • Blue Apron: A better way to cook. Get three meals free with your first purchase, and free shipping.
  • TextExpander, from Smile: Multiply your team’s productivity.

Apple Cuts Affiliate Commissions on Apps and IAPs

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Update: Apple “clarified” its position a few days later.

A few hours ago, Apple emailed members of its iTunes Affiliate program:

Starting on May 1st 2017, commissions for all app and in-app content will be reduced from 7% to 2.5% globally. All other content types (music, movies, books, and TV) will remain at the current 7% commission rate in all markets. We will also continue to pay affiliate commissions on Apple Music memberships so there are many ways to earn commissions with the program.

I don’t link to many apps from 512 Pixels, but when I do, it is with an affiliate link, and the generally do pretty well. In a world with falling web advertising rates,1 this is going to really hurt some websites.

John Gruber:

Everything about this strikes me as strange, including the mere one week notice and the severity of the cut. It’s not a small reduction — it’s effectively been cut in one-third. Note too that Apple is only reducing the affiliate commission for apps and in-app purchases — movies, music, and books are all still at 7 percent.

The single week’s notice is pretty lame, too.

  1. And RSS sponsorships that have become harder and harder to sell. ↩

LivePhotoKitJS ⇢

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Apple has introduced a JavaScript library to play Live Photos on the web:

By including the LivePhotosKit JS script on your page, you can create players by simply adding declarative markup to your HTML. As the page loads, LivePhotosKit JS will determine what player instances are on the page and initialize them. You can use any HTML tag that supports child nodes.

At minimum, each tag requires the following data attribute: data-live-photo. Doing this allows LivePhotosKit JS to find the DOM elements to be initialized as players.

I’ve come around to really liking Live Photos, but I don’t think I’ll be enabling them for the photos I share here. Most of my photos for the site aren’t shot with an iPhone, anyways.

AppStories ⇢

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AppStories is a new podcast by Federico and John over at MacStories. Here’s Ticci writing about the show:

Just like MacStories is our personal chronicle of the world of Apple, AppStories will be an ongoing exploration of the world of apps. Our goal is to provide listeners with a fresh perspective on the App Store and its ramifications with episodes that are easy to follow, well-researched, and respectful of their time.

We want AppStories to stand out as the premier show entirely focused on apps. That includes interviews with app makers, an analysis of the app culture and opportunities created by the app economy, as well as stories about our own relationship with apps. We have a lot of ideas for topics to cover, and it’s going to be a long journey.

I’ve watched the MacStories team work on this and polish their amazing website for months, and the output is really great. At 30 minutes once a week, this is a no-brainer addition to your podcast app of choice. I’m already looking forward to episode 2 next week.

Video: The iPhone 5c ⇢

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In 2013, Apple didn’t simply knock $100 off the price of the iPhone 5 when the 5s was announced. Instead, it replaced it with the plastic, colorful iPhone 5c.

The 5c was pretty much an iPhone 5 with a slightly larger battery and a better FaceTime camera, wrapped in a seamless, colorful plastic case. To date, I think this iPhone feels better in-hand than any other.

Leading up to this, there were many rumors about a cheaper iPhone. The 5c was decidedly not that phone; all it did was take the place of the iPhone 5 in the $100-less-than-it-used-to-be spot in the lineup.

Apple didn’t get into why the iPhone 5 disappeared so quickly. Perhaps it was a manufacturing issue, or they couldn’t get costs down enough to offer it for less. Whatever the reason, I’m glad the 5c exists. It’s just a lot of fun.

The 5c was available in five colors, and Apple made a unique, hole-punched case in six colors. It was easy to customize a look to your certain tastes. I’ve recently rounded them all up and made a little video about this unique iPhone:

You can download a bunch of high-quality photos of my iPhone 5c collection as a 434 MB .zip file here.