This Summer, Apple is coming out with a credit card called Apple Card. Ken Segall wrote an interesting article about an effort by Apple back in 2004 to come out with a credit card that never came to fruition. He even shares some interesting ad concepts for the credit card, which would have let you earn points to get free music from iTunes. (Ads might have included lines such as "Buy bed, get R.E.M." and "Buy balloons, get Zeppelin." How does he know about this if it was never released? Segall used to work for Apple's advertising agency, TBWA\Chiat\Day, where he not only authored the Think Different campaign in the 1990s, he also came up with the name "iMac," which makes him in some way responsible for every Apple product to follow with an "i" including, the iPhone. There is one oversight in Segall's article; he didn't know that Apple also had a credit card back in the early 1990s. I know about it because I used it as my primary card when I was in law school. The card let you earn credit to use towards an Apple product, and I was able to earn enough over a few years to pay much of the price for a Macintosh Performa, the home computer I was using when I first started practicing law in the mid-1990s. And now, the news of note from the past week:
- I often link to articles by California attorney David Sparks that related to the iPhone and iPad, and he has also created some useful video field guides for those devices such as his great Siri Shortcuts Field Guide (my review). Today, I'm going a little off topic to mention that Sparks created a video field guide for a Mac product called Keyboard Maestro, which you can use to automate tasks on a Mac. I purchased Keyboard Maestro a while back to use with my Mac at home, but I hadn't quite figured out how to use the software. David let me try out his Keyboard Maestro Field Guide for free, and I absolutely loved it. His videos show you exactly how to use the product, and after watching about half of the videos (there are lots of mini-sessions so you can just watch the ones that interest you, or you can watch them all), I had already created a number of new automation tasks on my Mac that I'm now using every day. If you own a Mac and you want to make it more powerful, you should check out the Keyboard Maestro Field Guide and the Keyboard Maestro software for the Mac. And here's a post by David Sparks introducing his new Field Guide.
- Jason Cross of Macworld recommends some useful but lesser-known features of Apple Maps.
- Ryan Christoffel of MacStories reviews Vignette, a new app by Casey Liss which can automate the task of adding pictures to the Contacts entries on your iPhone. You can use the app for free to find out what pictures it can find, and then for a one-time $5 charge you can unlock the app to add the pictures to your contacts.
- Last week, Apple released iOS 12.3, and I recommended that everyone update their iPhone and iPad. Even if you don't care about the new TV app, iOS updates always improve security. For example, Roger Fingas of AppleInsider explains how iOS 12.2 (released in March), fixed an exploit that websites could use to identify your specific device by using your iPhone's motion sensors. It's fascinating that someone was smart enough to figure that one out in the first place, but I'm glad that Apple fixed it.
- Federico Viticci of MacStories wrote an extensive article explaining how the iPad has been his main computer for the past seven years.
- I like that the Music app on the iPhone can tell my song lyrics and let's me search for a song based upon the one line in the song that I remember. But apparently there can be some pretty big errors in some of the lyrics. Jason Snell of Six Colors explores how these errors in lyrics happen.
- And finally, you can no longer buy a gold Apple Watch from Apple, but apparently you can make one. Casey Neistat teamed up with Zach Nelson to gold plate an Apple Watch, and it looks like the process actually worked, as you can see in this video:
