Donating with Apple Pay – or, why is it easier to pay for an Uber than to donate to UNICEF?

Update: Apple now allows the use of Apple Pay for making donations.

Apple promotes “Shopping with Apple Pay” in its App Store.

Image of App Store Shopping section showing apps that use Apply Pay

But where are the iOS apps for donating with Apple Pay? It would only seem appropriate for a company whose mission statement now ends with a dedication “to leaving the world better than we found it” to leverage the utility of Apple Pay in the nonprofit world.

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The Jobs of the Watch and the Smartwatch

The Jobs of the Watch

To begin, what are the jobs that watches are hired to do? They vary by person, but they can be condensed to the following:

Self-Satisfaction

The ownership and use of a watch produces self-satisfaction in two ways, through a sense of style and status. A watch, like all clothing and jewelry, reflects the owner’s sense of style and thus reveals some aspect of their personality. We communicate, either consciously or unconsciously, through what we choose to put on our bodies. But this isn’t just done for the benefit of others, we derive pleasure from what these signs say about us and our sense of self-worth. Through clothing and jewelry we can feel good about ourselves, or at the very least comfortable with how we come across to others.

As a social animal, we also draw utility and self-satisfaction from our rank, and jewelry like a watch sends a powerful signal about where we stand.

Connectedness

Functionally, a watch serves as a timekeeping device, with some watches having additional complications that give an even more fine grain view into time (for example, the phases of the moon or the day of the month). But what is time? No, really, what is it? Physicists don’t know, they only have hypotheses. Some hypotheses suggest that maybe actually everything that is happening, or has happened, or will happen, is actually happening right now, in one stretched out moment. Read more…


“The State of Information Visualization in Academic Libraries”

I gave a brief talk on “The State of Information Visualization in Academic Libraries” to the IT division of the Special Libraries Association. You can read the original paper or listen to the talk here.


How Apple Watch might leverage mesh networking

The Apple Watch is designed for three primary functions: timekeeping, communication, and fitness tracking. But if you go for a run with just the Apple Watch and no iPhone, one of those three functions, communication, no longer works. Short of building in a cellular receiver on the Watch, what could Apple do to allow for communication on the device?

One idea would be to use Apple’s own Multipeer Connectivity framework which allows for peer-to-peer connections between devices over WiFi and Bluetooth. The most well-known app that uses this functionality (also known as mesh networking) is Firechat, a chat app launched in March 2014 that has already been used in protest movements (a good primer on mesh networks can be found here). By not being centralized, mesh networking’s distributed communication model can avoid being shutdown in the event of political repression or a widespread power outage. Read more…


The Implications of Form Factor-led Design at Apple

Recently there has been a lot of discussion about a noticeable decline in the robustness and reliability of software and services at Apple over the past two years (well, poor services has been a long-running thing at Apple). Marco Arment kicked off the latest round of angst with “Apple has lost the functional high ground”, a piece that he has some come to regret but which largely speaks the truth about the state of software at Apple (for a great discussion, listen to the latest episode of ATP). His diagnosis of the issue was that the marketing-driven schedule of annual releases of OS X and iOS is at fault. This blog post sparked off a number of replies from other bloggers. Read more…