Apple Passbook card-’n'-ticket app paves way for iOS e-wallet
Apple's Passbook, announced at yesterday's developer conference as part of iOS 6, is clearly a step towards NFC payments, but even in its present form it has people pretty excited, so it's a shame that it won't work with the UK's biggest e-ticket deployment.
Passbook is like an address book for storing tokens and tickets, with associated machine-readable barcodes and geographic hotspots. The tickets are presented to the user with a consistent interface, and integrated into the lock screen for automatic display where needed, but Apple will only display static tickets: thus locking out the barcode-based e-tickets proving so popular on the UK train network.
Barcode ticketing is old news, and a handful of smartphone applications are already dispensing with paper to display the black-and-white codes on screen. Ticket gates in London's Kings Cross and Euston stations, along the Birmingham line, and elsewhere in the UK already feature integrated readers poised to scan smartphone screens. Read more...
Apple Said To Debut iCloud’s New Photo Sharing Features At WWDC
With Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference just weeks away, expect plenty of reports of new features to come crawling out of the woodwork. In fact, here’s one from the Wall Street Journal — they claim that Apple has been doing some major tinkering with their iCloud storage service, the fruits of which will be unveiled on June 11.
First up is the ability for users to share and comment on each other’s photos, a pretty dramatic shift away from iCloud’s current approach to photo storage. As it stands, each user has a single Photo Stream meant mostly to make sure images are on the devices they need to be on. This shift in sharing actually sounds a little reminiscent of Apple’s recently-killed MobileMe service, though how exactly the sharing process would play out within iCloud is still up in the air. Read more...