Originally published at: http://appletalk.com.au/2017/04/friday-morning-news280417/
Recode says Apple is interested in launching its own peer-to-peer money transfer service, allowing iPhone users to send money to other iPhone users. It’s said that this personal payments service will compete with Paypal subsidiary Venmo, which performs a similar function in allowing users to send money to other users, but a release date for Apple’s cash transfer service is still unknown. It’s also likely Apple would have to consider incentives to push people to use its personal wallet, over conventional prepaid debit cards.
Business Insider outlines the plans for video content that Apple’s Jimmy Iovine has in store for Apple Music. Iovine says that he wants Apple Music to be more than just a collection of songs and playlists, and he’s “trying to help Apple Music be an overall movement in popular culture, everything from unsigned bands to video. We have a lot of plans”. While Apple Music will soon feature Carpool Karaoke and Planet of the Apps, there’s plenty of music-related video on the horizon, too.
A new patent from Apple investigates long-distance wireless charging via Wi-Fi and other communications equipment. Data frequencies currently used by the WiGig standard are the main focus of the patent application, with both the transmitter and receiver capable of capturing data signals and converting those to power, even if the resulting current only trickle-charges the device.
Apple has announced an App Store price hike for Mexico, Denmark, and countries that use the Euro as their currency. Foreign exchange rates are cited as the main reason for the price adjustment happening sometime next week, with base pricing now starting at 1.09 Euros.
TechCrunch wonders where Apple’s Amazon Echo competitor is, but the truth is that it may be closer than we think. There have been rumours about a hub-like device capable of communicating via Siri and acting as an AirPlay target, but so far we haven’t seen or heard about any hardware leaks.
9to5Mac put together a Hackintosh without using one of the major Hackintosh resources of our time. Their machine built and run using the Clover EFI bootloader works just as well as any alternative, with a couple of the same caveats that tonymacx86 machines would have had. Minor compatibility issues with Thunderbolt 3, 4K at 60Hz over HDMI, and iMessage are all issues that aren’t uncommon to Hackintosh machines.
MacStories tells us about the OCR features of Prizma Go, which uses cloud OCR technology based on Microsoft’s Computer Vision API to detect text in 22 languages. While there’s an option for on-device OCR, some iOS camera smarts make either OCR tech option a powerful, simple option for mobile OCR.
Federico Viticci’s latest iPad Diary talks up the advanced file management features found in the iOS version of DevonThink.
In case you’re still keeping track, we’re up to the fifth beta of iOS 10.3.2, now available for developers and members of Apple’s public beta testing program. Seemingly no user-facing features are part of this release, so expect bug fixes and performance improvements.
Over at Daring Fireball, John Gruber writes about judging Apple Watch success, saying that it’s easy to call the product a failure in the absence of any hard sales numbers (which Apple has never released).