Apple has officially announced a new Tap to Pay feature for iPhone. This feature, coming later this year, will allow businesses to use their iPhone to “seamlessly and securely” accept Apple Pay payments with a simple tap. The feature will also work for contactless credit cards and debit cards, as well as other digital wallets.
Even better, Apple has promised a full SDK for third-party developers to integrate touchless payment support in their own iPhone apps and has already partnered with Stripe as the first payment processor to support the feature. From the Apple Newsroom release:
Tap to Pay on iPhone will be available to participating payment platforms and their app developer partners to leverage in their software developer kits (SDKs) in an upcoming iOS software beta.
One other interesting wrinkle in this story is the lack of any mention of iPad support for this feature — presumably because no current iPad models include NFC support (despite certain models ostensibly including an NFC chip, disabled or otherwise). Given that so many small shop payment terminals are just iPads on swivel stands, you'd think Apple would prioritize adding this feature to iPad hardware as well. Recent rumors have suggested unexpectedly-imminent refreshes to the base iPad as well as the iPad Air, as well as more-timely iPad Pro updates. Zach Knox connected the dots for us in the Relay FM Members Discord:
Zach Knox, connecting the dots with red twine and thumbtacks.
The pre-announcement of Tap to Pay support on iPhone is surely setting the stage for the alleged March 8th Apple Event, which is set to include new iPad hardware spanning the entire line. I expect NFC support will be explicitly called out in any new iPads announced at this event, perhaps even with a shout-out to the new Tap to Pay support as well.
The flowers are blooming, the birds are chirping, and Tim Cook is eager to show off some new products — and undoubtedly some engaging graphs — ripe for the season remotely from Apple Park. I thought it would be fun to add some of my product predictions to the fertile soil of supply chain rumors, curated event drafts, and previsioni di passione 🤌.
AirTags are announced. I consider this one low-hanging fruit. This product won’t go the way of AirPower; it will arrive precisely when it means to (especially given indications like the Find My Items tab in iOS 14.5 and the just-added support for third-party tracking devices). I expect they’ll probably come in a 3-pack, and retail for $49.99 (just slightly more than I would like them to be).
New iPads, both Pro and Mini. Another freebie — updated iPad Pros have been in the rumor pipeline for a while, and the timing lines up with previous updates to the line. I have my doubts that the fancy new miniLED screen technology is ready to ship, but I also struggle to think of other improvements to the iPad Pro hardware worthy of stage time — it’s just so good. Sure, another USB-C port (nay: a USB-4/Thunderbolt port), a landscape-oriented FaceTime camera, and a new processor would all be great...but my 2018 11” iPad Pro still feels delightfully brand-new. The real (if still insufficient) iPad Pro improvements will ultimately arrive at WWDC in June, when iPadOS gets its opportunity to catch up with its hardware. I expect the iPad Mini will also get a refresh — everyone is hoping for an iPad-Pro like design to grace the smaller form factor of the iPad Mini, but my guess is that it looks just about the same with a slightly newer chip (leftover A13s, perhaps).
The Apple Pencil 3. Of the potential products unveiled at this event, AirTags and a new Apple Pencil are the ones I am most likely to purchase. The 2nd-gen Apple Pencil (much like the 2018 iPad Pro it is attached to) still feels like magic to me, and is hands-down the best stylus I’ve ever used. Ultimately, the only thing I expect Apple to add to its successor is an “input” surface on the eraser-side of the Pencil for, well, erasing things. Microsoft’s Surface Pen has had this feature (and, get this, a button too!) since 2012 — an eraser is the next logical addition to one of Apple’s best accessories, especially given their investment in handwriting on iPad with the addition of Scribble support in iPadOS 14.
The iMac Redesign. I think this is probably the boldest of my predictions: this event is in essence a vehicle to announce completely redesigned iMacs shipping with Apple Silicon chips. I expect radically smaller bezels (and a chin-ectomy), a re-evaluation of the iMac stand (perhaps taking hints from the oft-mocked Pro Display XDR stand...and maybe the reason behind the event’s “springy” branding?), and a selection of new colors to boot (silver, space gray, rose gold, and perhaps a blue hue). All of this is great news for folks in the market for a desktop Mac with a great screen — I just hope that Apple has the good sense to ship it with a 1080p webcam.
Wild Card: A New Apple TV and an Accompanying Services Segment. Ok, I lied, I’ve got one even bolder prediction: A brand-new Apple TV is announced, complete with a new Siri Remote. And, to keep projecting my own desires: the new Apple TV will be an Apple TV/HomePod love-child that has cropped up in recent supply chain rumors. This prediction is entirely destined to be wrong, but I want this product so badly that I have to put it out into the world in hopes of it being right. I also think Apple scarcely misses an opportunity for a Services segment, and what better way to segue into an Apple TV+ promo than by announcing new TV hardware?
I think tomorrow’s Apple event will largely go exactly as the rumors and pundits expect it to — which means about half of my predictions are bound to be wrong. Either way, it’s always nice to have an opportunity to wish-cast about something other than vaccine rollouts — a brief reprieve in the form of excitement in a world so thoroughly exhausted. That said, most of this event’s products won’t be “for me” — I might pick up some AirTags, and a new Apple Pencil is intriguing to me, but my 2018 iPad Pro is still more capable (well, hardware-wise) than I need it to be. I’m mostly just along for the ride of collective joy that Apple events engender in the communities I frequent.
On last week’s episode of Connected, Federico Viticci described the way in which he embeds images as he writes in iA Writer and subsequently uploads those images to the MacStories CMS. You can listen to this section of the latest episode, but in short: Federico uses iA Writer’s Content Block feature to insert images and view them right in the editor’s preview window — and then uses Scriptable to upload all of the images one-by-one and replace the Content Block with the actual image embed. I also use iA Writer for all of the posts on Peer Reviewed, but I have a different (and perhaps more efficient) way of handling images as I put together my posts: in-line HTML.
Marking Up Your Markdown
One of the many benefits of writing in Markdown is that most editors natively parse HTML as well, because Markdown and HTML are intended to work seamlessly with each other — as John Gruber himself explains here:
For any markup that is not covered by Markdown’s syntax, you simply use HTML itself. There’s no need to preface it or delimit it to indicate that you’re switching from Markdown to HTML; you just use the tags.
What this means is that iA Writer can natively parse and preview HTML tags inside my Markdown documents — including the figure and figcaption tags. Whenever I want to embed an image in a blog post, I simply paste in a snippet of HTML that points to the permalink of the image, and includes an image caption and alt text. Here’s what it looks like in both the editor window and the preview window in iA Writer:
iA Writer natively parses the HTML on the left to show the image in the preview window on the right.
This strategy for inserting images makes it very clear where in the editor you have images inserted (because the HTML sticks out so plainly), while also allowing you to preview a post as it would appear on the web right inside iA Writer. An added bonus being that your final draft is already 100% ready for the web, since everything you have written is already either Markdown or HTML.
Generating HTML Snippet with Shortcuts
The other advantage of using in-line HTML instead of iA Writer’s Content Block system is the speed with which the appropriate HTML snippet can be generated — with the help of Shortcuts, of course. As a general rule, images in my blog posts are either screenshots from an Apple device, or a photo I’ve taken of a physical product, like a keyboard or a CPU heatsink. As such, I have two Siri Shortcuts I use to generate the HTML snippets for each of these scenarios — framed device screenshots are generated with a modified version of Federico’s own Apple Frames shortcut, and any other images are uploaded via my own Image Uploader shortcut.
Both of these shortcuts effectively do the same thing (after device frames are added to any screenshots):
Upload the image (in my case, to Imgur)
Get the permalink of the image
Ask for descriptive alt text and a caption
Combine the image URL, alt text, and caption in an HTML figure snippet
Copy the snippet to the clipboard and kick me back into iA Writer
An all-in-one shortcut for adding a device frame, uploading, captioning, and generating the final HTML for an image really streamlines the process.
It only takes a few moments for the shortcut to finish running, plus or minus the time it takes for me to come up with a punchy caption for the image I’m uploading. Once it’s finished, all I have to do is paste the HTML where I want the image to appear in my post and iA Writer will natively allow me to preview the image as well as its caption just as it would appear on the web (CSS notwithstanding). And if I decide to reword a caption or change the image I want to use, all I have to do is edit the HTML snippet in the iA Writer document itself — the beauty of an all-text system for composing an article.
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This system for quickly uploading and inserting images while still being able to preview them in iA Writer has worked very well for me. The aspect I like most about this method is how little effort is needed to go from a completed post in iA Writer to publishing it on Peer Reviewed — I literally copy and paste the text and it is ready to publish. I think Federico’s system for uploading to the MacStories CMS and publishing articles to his site might necessarily be a bit more complex than mine, but I have a feeling that this method for handling images might be slightly more streamlined than using Content Blocks and custom Scriptable scripts to swap out file paths with HTML while editing.
When the Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro was announced, many users (myself included) were disappointed at the lack of hardware media keys — especially ones to manually control the brightness of the long-awaited backlit keys. Alas, the only way to currently do so is to navigate to Settings > General > Keyboard > Hardware Keyboard (or a bit faster using Federico Viticci’s shortcut workaround). However, it seems plainly obvious that a backlight brightness slider should live in Control Center. I present a simple mock up of what that might look like:
Adding a keyboard brightness slider as a long-press option to the system brightness slider is a no-brainer.
Barring a complete overhaul of the main Control Center dropdown when a Magic Keyboard is connected, I think the long-press menu of the system brightness slider is where an additional slider for backlight brightness should live. Swipe down, long-press, adjust brightness, and you’re done!
