Feedbin

Another great-looking alternative to Google Reader, and only costs $2/mo (or $20/year, as stated in this recent blog post). I'm excited to check it out, although I'd prefer if they had an actual iOS app rather than just a mobile website.

Quicksilver is Finally Leaving Beta Status

Now they just need to find a way to bring back all the users who have moved on to greener pastures.

'Delicate Balance'

Gruber:

“The last thing Apple should do is ignore Samsung, to just sit there and take it, stoically. I think Microsoft took that stance against Apple’s “Get a Mac” campaign and it hurt them. When you’re the market leader, you do need to be more graceful, it’s harder, but you still need to fight. That’s why Pepsi will trash Coke by name, but Coke will never mention Pepsi. ”

Couldn't agree more. It's kind of hard to believe that, despite the "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" campaign from only a few years ago, people thought Apple wouldn't be the type to directly respond to Samsung's recent (and popular) attack ads.

Apple is a company with plenty of fight in it, don't worry.

'Free Works'

Marco Arment makes some more excellent points about the Google Reader shutdown:

“And we lucked out with Reader — imagine how much worse it would be if website owners weren’t publishing open RSS feeds for anyone to fetch and process, but were instead posting each item to a proprietary Google API. We’d have almost no chance of building a successful alternative.

That’s Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. (Does the shutdown make more sense now?)”

While I agree with Marco that the internet is generally better off for having had Reader around, and I'm also optimistic that a fine solution will someday replace it, I think the way Google handled this was a bit dickish.

They swept in with a free product, practically took over the RSS industry with it (which likely put some other developers out of work), never bothered to monetize the product, then unceremoniously dropped it years later like a bad habit.

I would say it's analagous to Starbucks single-handedly snuffing out thousands of smaller coffee chains around the world, but at least they had the sense to charge for their product and are so far sticking around as a result.

'Play By Your Own Rules'

Josh Williams, former CEO of Gowalla:

“We were the younger, prettier, but less popular sister of Foursquare. And even that had changed. In time, Foursquare had dramatically improved the design and experience of its service. This was no longer a defensible platform for us as a company.

Around this time we knew that our path was in trouble. We would have to pull out the stops to change our game.”

Fascinating look at what happened behind the scenes during the Gowalla-vs-Foursquare race that seemed like a big deal only a few years ago, and the hard lessons Gowalla had to learn.

'Three Months to Scale NewsBlur'

The last few days have been pretty intense for Samuel Clay, developer of NewsBlur. 60,000 new people have signed up for his service, 5,000 of which have become premium subscribers. This is more than double the previous number of 50,000 users. Incredible.

I've been checking out NewsBlur myself (using the live demo at the link above), and it looks fantastic. Once he has the scaling issue figured out, it might just be amongst the next group of killer RSS services.

'Why I Love RSS and You Do Too'

Brent Simmons, the creator of NetNewsWire, lists some reasons why RSS is still so great even today. You should head over there and read all of it, but I especially thought the two items concerning "Twitter as RSS" were great:

• There are no user caps. No company can tell your favorite app how many users it can have. (Twitter does this.)

• Nobody can tell you how to display an article from an RSS feed. (Twitter does this with tweets.)

'Baby Steps Toward Replacing Google Reader'

Marco Arment wants someone to get another solid RSS syncing backend going before Google shuts down in a few months:

“We need to start simple. We don’t have much time. And if we don’t do it this way, the likely alternative is that a few major clients will make their own custom sync solutions that won’t work with any other company’s clients, which won’t bring them nearly as much value as it will remove from their users.”

The idea he lays out in the rest of his article seems feasible enough to me.

This is one of those times I wish I had the programming chops to take advantage of a huge opportunity like this, but like Marco says, there's just not enough time. We'll have to rely on someone who already knows this stuff in and out to get the job done. And who better than the devs behind NetNewsWire and Reeder, right?

Google Reader is Shutting Down

If you're like me, you've probably already heard from a hundred different sources about Google Reader shutting down on July 1st, something they listed almost offhandedly amongst other announcements. A rather anticlimactic end for such a beloved service, I think.

Obviously this is sad news for those of us who've come to depend on the service over the years, but it's not all gloom and doom the way some people are making it out to be!

The nice thing about RSS as a format is that it's an open standard that can be used by anyone. As I tweeted earlier this evening, and what Marco Arment later agreed with, is that this is the perfect time for somebody to rise up and take Google Reader's place. Google, perhaps unintentionally, just opened up a market they never managed to capitalize on themselves.

I feel confident that many tech nerds like myself would gladly pay a reasonable fee to access such a service, provided the following:

• It acts as a syncing "backbone" that any RSS app can use, and with a simple login scheme.
• It allows users to easily import/export OPML files without making them jump through any hoops.
• It has a solid web app (shouldn't be too hard to beat Google Reader on this one).
• The developer actively updates it.
• Fantastic support for 3rd-party services (Twitter, Evernote, 1Password, etc).
• Can be used to generate and track RSS feeds (this one might be a stretch but I'm thinking of a combination of Reader and Feedburner, another Google failure).

Of course, all of this assumes the user is even interested in sticking with RSS rather than simply following their favorite sites on Twitter or App.net. This is certainly a plausible alternative but I've never been a big fan of it myself. I prefer to keep these two types of reading activities separate — it's just easier for me to manage everything that way. Twitter lists are a step in the right direction here, but the service itself just isn't ideal for reading web content. Yet.

Personally, I'm thinking about setting up a Fever server to host my RSS feeds, partially after some encouragement from Nate Boateng but also because it's supposedly easy to get up-and-running, even for lazy people like myself. It certainly doesn't hurt that the iPhone version of Reeder (my go-to RSS app) supports it, or that it has features far beyond what Reader is capable of.

There are also a couple of other nice-looking contenders springing up: FeedWrangler, a project by David Smith, and Newsblur, which I intend to sign up for. More are sure to come.

I think that the next several months should prove to be very interesting with Google out of the way. There are some serious business opportunities to be seized on, which will benefit all of us, both as customers and as fans of new ideas in technology.

70Decibels Joins the 5by5 Network

Myke Hurley:

“As the network continues to grow, our ambitions grow with it. Our hosts put out shows that deserve a larger audience, and my dream of a career in podcasting is within reach. To get to the next level, we need help. We need a better infrastructure and even more great people to support the network we have created. That’s why I’m thrilled to announce that 70Decibels is going to be moving to the 5by5 Podcasting Network.”

Congratulations to Myke, Dan, and everyone else involved. I love many shows from both podcast networks, so this is pretty exciting.

Composition Isn't Everything

"Consulting the rules of composition before taking a photograph is like consulting the laws of gravity before going for a walk" —Edward Weston

It's been a little while since I last talked about photography around here, and I've had the itch lately so you can expect a few more upcoming articles on the subject. Today's topic is photo composition.

Composition is one of those subjects that comes up all the time in photography. There are entire books dedicated to the rule of thirds (sometimes referred to as the golden ratio). The masters tell us to use leading lines whenever possible, and to focus (heh) on our depth-of-field.

These kinds of tips are great, and a lot of the time they will help you produce better photos than if you just pointed your camera at something and snapped the shot without thinking about it. But worrying about composition too much can also cause the photographer to miss a crucial moment.

Take this photo of Jack Lew being sworn in as Treasury Secretary, for example:

When I see this photo, I don't see a political agenda, or any of the usual bitterness shared between members of upper government. I have no idea at all where Jack Lew stands on any issues. What I see is a man, surrounded by family members, all of whom dressed up nice and came with him to the Oval Office to support him on this momentous occasion. Just look how happy everyone is.

And yet, it isn't an especially fantastic composition. It doesn't have to be in order for the photo to turn out great.

This scene wouldn't have been empirically better or more interesting if the photographer had stood up on a chair and tried to capture it all from some weird vantage point. Jack Lew and Joe Biden aren't perfectly centered. In fact, everything is a little off-balance because of where everyone is standing. But none of that really matters.

The photographer simply stood across the room, made sure everyone fit into the frame, and pushed a button at the right time. Sometimes that's all it takes to properly convey the story.

Patrick Rhone very nearly touched on this idea in his "Happy Accidents" piece:

“Once again, action shots should have action. They shouldn’t be perfect. They shouldn’t be still. They should be blurry and full of energy. Glad I did not toss this one.”

I'm sure many of us have been guilty of the same thing, quickly trashing images that didn't meet our expectations or weren't as well-composed as we had hoped because we were in a rush. But what I've found is that those "accidents" can sometimes be more exciting than a "properly" composed image.

None of this is to say that nobody should study the rules of composition. In fact, I highly encourage doing so because then you'll know exactly how to break the rules when it's required. Still, I would argue that the more important factors of a great shot are usually timing and luck, rather than the composition itself.

'The Good, Racist People'

Ta-Nehisi Coates, in an NYT op-ed:

“I am trying to imagine a white president forced to show his papers at a national news conference, and coming up blank. I am trying to a imagine a prominent white Harvard professor arrested for breaking into his own home, and coming up with nothing. I am trying to see Sean Penn or Nicolas Cage being frisked at an upscale deli, and I find myself laughing in the dark. It is worth considering the messaging here. It says to black kids: “Don’t leave home. They don’t want you around.” It is messaging propagated by moral people.”

It's disheartening to know that racism is still this prevalent in our society. As a white male and lifelong Oklahoman, I've never been the direct target of racism but I've been a witness to more of it than I care to remember.

I grew up around the kinds of rednecks who proudly displayed the Confederate flag on their trucks, or went into the military so they could exact revenge on "towel-heads" after the events of 9/11. There are still parts of town white people won't venture into at night, assuming they'll be instantly mugged at gunpoint.

A friend of our family, who happens to live in an upper-class area, once had the misfortune of attending a neighborhood meeting where people were upset about the black family that had just moved in. Apparently they thought the family was bringing down the property value of the area.

My own grandfather—who was a great man in other respects—was always extremely prejudiced towards black people. The best compliment I ever heard him give to a black person went something like, "At least he ain't lazy like other [n-word]s." When he found out that I had a crush on a black girl in high school, he told me matter-of-factly that I wouldn't be allowed to bring her over to visit. I never asked her out.

The realist in me understands that these kinds of racial prejudices will be around for many more generations, but the idealist in me yearns to see the day where they are a thing of the past.

'Breaking Down Amazon's Mega Dropdown'

Developer Ben Kamens analyzes the dropdown menu behavior on Amazon, revealing the clever design trick that makes it so pleasant to navigate compared to other dropdowns on the web.

Meltwater vs. The News

Richard Dunlop-Walters:

"Media-monitoring service Meltwater is in the cross-hairs this week, as the nation’s biggest newspapers pledge their support for the AP in a lawsuit that labels Meltwater a parasite."

After reading a bit more on this issue, I can't see what Meltwater is doing that Google isn't doing every single day. They're more of a search-engine than a news outlet. I recommend reading Richard's full report for more details.

Update: Meltwater's legal team has given a response:

"Among other things, AP has misused its copyright monopoly by demanding that third parties take licenses for search results, which do not require a license under U.S. copyright law, and AP has also formed a consortium (called NewsRight) with the purpose of further misusing its copyright monopoly to extract licensing fees that exceed what the law allows."

Good to see they're not taking these accusations lying down.

An Address to New Readers

Hello, everyone. Over the weekend, my Apple Store piece gained quite a lot of attention thanks to sites like Hacker News and Reddit. The count is still climbing as of this morning, albeit a bit more slowly, but so far it has attracted 70,400 views. This is a high enough number that it makes the previous years' worth of traffic almost look like a flatline:

Needless to say, I've been a bit beside myself watching all of this happen. I never anticipated such a strong response, which has naturally been both positive and negative. The positive feedback I've received has far outweighed the negative, but those few negative responses still bothered me.

After a while, I simply stopped reading the Hacker News and Reddit threads, but before doing so I saw that my story was being called into question. I'm not about to address every single complaint, but I would like to clarify a few things:

• Yes, these events really happened.
• Yes, certain parts of the story were a little embellished, a tiny bit of which was for storytelling purposes but mainly because the event took place 6 or 7 years ago and my memory is terrible. In all honesty, they may have all been purchasing iPod Touches rather than MacBooks and I could be misremembering. It's certainly a gigantic difference money-wise but that's also not really the point of the story.
• No, I don't remember what the name of their school was or why they all knew sign language if they weren't deaf. They may have been training to become deaf translators, for all I know. I had a couple of friends back in high school who were doing exactly that, so I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility.
• No, I didn't write it to pat myself on the back. It was an experience I had that I felt like sharing, that's all. Anyone who knows me in real life knows that I am definitely not someone who seeks out lots of attention. I wrote this as someone who doesn't expect more than maybe a few hundred page hits on a given day, and that's if I'm lucky! To be quite honest, being in the spotlight is an uncomfortable position for me, as I'll talk about in a minute.
• When I said the students were going store-to-store, I didn't mean that they went on a huge shopping spree. They were in the mall mainly to visit the Apple Store, but they visited various stores (not every single one) and spent a few minutes simply trying to ask employees questions. One example I remember was a student trying to ask someone at one of the clothing stores where they could find a certain brand of jeans. The point of the assignment was to see how employees dealt with these types of situations, not to buy anything.

After the story blew up, I wondered if very many people were subscribing to the site's RSS feed. I have no way of telling, since Squarespace 6's RSS service doesn't track that sort of thing. I do know that I gained several followers on Twitter and nearly doubled my follower count on App.net.

For a short while, I hesitated to post anything on either service for fear of suddenly alienating all these new people. I've since decided that it wouldn't be fair to myself not to express my thoughts in the way I choose.

I'm going to continue doing exactly what I've always done, which is post stuff that interests me, make the occasional bad joke, and not worry whether or not people who found me through a lighthearted story get offended that I have certain strong political views (just to get this out of the way right now, I'm about as liberal as it gets). I may lose the new followers, and already have lost a few, but I figure they probably wouldn't have stuck around long anyway.

The same kind of thing goes for this site. Any new readers should know right now that I don't constantly post long, personal, feel-good stories. They do come up occasionally but aren't the focus of this site. Check the archives if you want a better idea of what I do here. Yes, I have link-posts like many other tech bloggers do. Sorry if that bugs anyone.

Again, I sincerely thank everyone for all the kind words I've received these last few days, and I hope many of you will stick around as regular readers :)

*Whew!* Now I've got all that off my chest, back to work.

The Coolest Experience I Had as an Apple Store Employee

It was a particularly busy day, which is a bit of an understatement. I don't quite remember which product had just released that morning, but it was the kind of thing that had attracted a long line of campers outside the entrance the night before. The store was so packed it felt like working inside of a sardine can all day.

Somewhere in the middle of this hectic rush, a group of about 15 high school kids came through the door, accompanied by their teacher. It seemed like an odd day to take a field trip to the Apple Store, I thought. My curiosity was piqued though, and since I happened to be free at that moment, I went over to talk to them.

The kids basically ignored me, but the teacher was happy to speak for the group. She said that their school—which sounded to me like a small, upper-class, private institution—was providing one MacBook for each of the students. No Pro models or anything, just the low-end plastic ones. They'd all been given an Apple Store gift card to purchase with, so they would all be rung up individually.

Each student was given the choice of a black or a white 160GB MacBook. I supposed they had all been brought to the Apple Store to check each one out at the last minute and see what they liked best, but it didn't take long for the students to form a line next to the teacher with their minds already made up. And then the teacher walked off to handle a student who was being particularly rowdy.

And then it dawned on me that all of these students were all speaking to one another in sign language.

They were from a school for the deaf.

While the teacher was tied up with the troublemaker, the first student in line began signing something to me. Now, I had taken a 6-week sign language course in high school, but that was years ago and I couldn't remember how to sign much more than "thank you" and the "He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother" song (it was our final project, don't ask me why). I had no idea what this kid was saying.

I put my hands up and started doing that thing where I'm mouthing words and kind of adding an airy whisper, you know, the way you might do with someone on the other side of a car door window. I've never really understood why people make that noise, when we know the other person can't hear it.

Anyway, the point is, I was trying my best to communicate to him that I don't speak sign. Once we finally established that, a light bulb went off in my head and I walked him over to the nearest iMac so we could open TextEdit and simply type back and forth. What else was I going to do? It was insanely busy and there was still a line waiting outside the door.

Our text conversation was pretty curt:

-how are you doing?

good

-cool. so you're wanting a macbook?

yeah i like the white one

-ok

and so it went until he had paid for his MacBook and the next student stepped up. I had a version of this text conversation with every single one of these kids. I suppose I could have been more efficient by getting all their MacBooks at once, but instead I ended up walking back and forth between the sales floor and the stock room to grab each one individually.

It wouldn't occur to me until later that the teacher could have jumped in as translator at any point after I had rung up the first kid, but she chose to let me communicate with the students via text messages on a screen instead. I remember thinking that we could have saved a lot of time and effort, but I wasn't too perturbed by it or anything.

I mean, the kids were mostly friendly, and it was an overall enjoyable experience. Kinda fun, actually. It was certainly a nice distraction from the other craziness going on that day. Eventually, all the students had their MacBooks and were saying their "thank yous" in sign as they left.

This is the point where the story should have ended, in my mind. But fast-forward a few hours, when the craziness in the store had died down a little and we were finally being allowed to start staggering our lunch breaks. When my break time rolled around, I headed to the food court upstairs (did I mention my Apple Store was in a mall?) to grab some grub.

You know who was sitting at a big table together up there? You guessed it, the group of students and their teacher. But...imagine my surprise when they were all talking to each other out loud, no more sign language involved.

I must've stood there dumbfounded for several seconds before one of the students pointed me out. The teacher turned around, laughed at the look on my face, and got up to come talk to me about what I was seeing. She explained that none of the kids were actually deaf, although the part about their school getting them MacBooks was true.

Apparently, the teacher had decided to turn this outing into a strange assignment/experiment. The idea was for the group of kids to spend the entire day at the mall, going store-to-store and behaving as if they were deaf to see how employees treated them. After explaining all of this, the teacher told me that almost every single store they'd visited had treated them a bit terribly. As if they were annoyed that they had to deal with all these "deaf" kids and preferred to be finished with them as soon as possible.

The next part of her story made me feel awesome inside: She said that I was the only person they worked with all day that had treated them like real people, and actually tried to be as helpful as the situation allowed. They had all been impressed with my idea of using TextEdit to communicate, because nobody else in the mall had even bothered to grab a pen and some paper.

The students got to learn a real lesson about how the world treats those who are a little different, and I got a bunch of hugs and handshakes in return, along with a few tears shed all around. They even bought my lunch! We sat around and chatted for a while before I had to go back to work, and we exchanged a few more hugs before I left. I haven't seen any of those kids since but they all seemed like a good bunch so I'm sure they're all doing well somewhere.

It was one of the most feel-good, warm and fuzzy experiences I've ever had, and I will remember it forever.

---

Update: Wow, I really didn't expect this story to blow up the way it has. I've never had anything voted up on Hacker News before, much less gain the top spot. I'm still not convinced it hasn't all been a fever-dream.

The generally positive response I've been getting from readers all evening has been incredible. I've received tons of emails/tweets/ADN posts from people who have been kind enough to share their similar stories with me. Many of them are far more touching than what I published here today and deserve all this attention more than I do.

Tonight has been a strange, wonderful, exciting, nerve-wracking experience. I'm not sure I can ever express my gratitude for all the support I've received. Thank you, everyone.

Now, here is a picture of my son looking super smug for your enjoyment:

'Open and Shut'

"This was the most open decision — in Wu’s sense of the word open — in the entire history of Apple Computer Inc.

And it nearly bankrupted the company."

Gruber doing excellent work, as always.

Pandora Re-Introduces 40-Hour Listening Cap for Free Mobile Users

Title is self-explanatory, but Jared Newman for Time Tech had this to add:

"It’s worth noting that Pandora did turn a small profit last quarter, according to TechCrunch, but the company expects heavy losses ahead, possibly as high as $20 million in the first quarter of 2013."

Pandora is one of those services I don't use much anymore now that I've got Spotify, but if I did use it more than a couple times a month, I would definitely become a paying subscriber. Hell, I might just sign up anyway. These guys provide an excellent service and have done so for years.

This is just another example of the recording industry's greediness forcing good services to employ these kinds of tactics in order to survive. Ugh.

The iPad Apps that Power my Tools and Toys Workflow

One of the topics I’ve been most enthusiastic about lately is the idea of using only an iPad to do all my work. I’m not talking about my day job here, but rather my writing workflow, and more specifically the writing I do for Tools and Toys.

(I would love to have a nice workflow setup for Unretrofied, but unfortunately the Squarespace iOS app is pretty terrible and there are no alternatives due to their lack of an API. So while I may do some writing for Unretrofied on the iPad using Byword, I almost always publish from the back-end CMS on a desktop or laptop.)

Since Tools and Toys runs on WordPress, there are a wider array of apps I can use for publishing, which makes an iPad-only workflow more feasible. I’d like to discuss the apps I use to get the job done, but first it helps to know the ground rules for every T&T post:

• Each post must contain an image, 600px wide being okay but 1200px being better for Retina displays. Either way, the site will display the image in a 600px wide box.
• Image file sizes should be reasonable so as not to delay page-load times. The 150kb–200kb range is fine.
• These images must be hosted on the site’s Amazon S3 account.
• There are three custom fields used within the CMS: the image link, the product link, and the name of the store/website where an item can be bought.
• Stephen Hackett and I each have a particular posting schedule, so we need to be able to schedule final drafts to be automatically published at a later date/time.
• When we link to something on iTunes or Amazon, we must use affiliate links.

Obviously there’s no one app that can do all these things, but I’ve managed to accumulate a variety of apps that have allowed me to do my work on-the-go. So far I’ve managed to get the entire workflow down to a handful of apps.

The first app, Instapaper, comes into play long before I ever write anything. I’ve got a special folder set aside where I like to save ideas for potential products to write about. If I come across something cool out on the web, I save it to this folder and reference it later when it’s time to write a new post.

The next two apps I use are Safari and Mail.app. I use Safari for finding links and images, as well as researching items to make sure I know what I’m talking about when I’m writing about them. When I can’t find a nice, hi-res image of a product anywhere, I use Mail.app to ask the makers of those products if they have any images I can use. Everyone I’ve ever talked to has been super nice and helpful.

Once I’ve got an image, or a set of images, I use an app called Reduce to batch-resize them. I even have a preset stored in the app: 1200px wide, 150kb file size. I run the photos through that preset, and the app saves a copy of each image to a “Reduce Export” album on the iPad for easy management.

The way I currently upload these images to Amazon S3 is with the iFiles app, which presents the most convoluted part of my current workflow. It’s an okay app for uploading, but it seems to have no way of renaming files or copying their public URLs, which is why I’m still on the lookout for something better.

Since I can’t rename from within iFiles, what I’ll typically do is remotely login to my office PC using LogMeIn Ignition¹ and do it there. This step is technically unnecessary, but I prefer having a file name that uses the name of the product rather than something generic like “Photo02272013.jpg” or whatever.

Why is that, exactly? Well for one thing, it makes it easier to locate a particular image in our list of previous uploads if I need to. Secondly, even though I can’t copy the public link, I can simply take the url http://i.toolsandtoys.net.s3.amazonaws.com/img/file-name.jpg and substitute the file-name portion with the easy-to-remember file name I just made. A bit ghetto but it works.

Let’s just say that my life will be a lot easier if I can find a suitable replacement for iFiles.

Now that I’ve dealt with images, I’ve got to manage the text stuff. My absolute favorite app for writing and publishing to WordPress is Poster. It’s beautiful, easy to navigate around, and it features everything I need to publish a post, including those custom fields I mentioned earlier.

Next up comes the links. Regular links are easy to copy and paste, but when it comes to affiliate links I have a couple of tools at my disposal. The first one is Launch Center Pro, in which I’ve set up custom URL schemes for each link-type. They both operate based on whatever’s saved to my clipboard. Since this app was more intended for iPhone than iPad though, I tend to use TextExpander snippets to generate the links instead. Poster includes TextExpander support so these snippets are a breeze to use.

Lastly, we’ve got Dropbox. This is where I store any drafts or images I have yet to put together as final posts. I can access them from anywhere, and Poster can pull text files from Dropbox in order to create new posts. Doesn’t need much more explanation than that.

So there you have it. There are still some kinks to be worked out, and the overall process of putting things together could be a little smoother, but the sheer fact that I can do almost everything straight from my iPad is awesome to me.

Before I end this post (which is incidentally about 20x longer than most T&T things I’ve ever written), I’d like to thank Shawn for giving me the opportunity to write for the site. It’s been a blast so far and I look forward to where the site is headed.

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1. This app is incredibly expensive these days at $130, but I bought it years ago when it was on sale for $20 and I had an iTunes gift card.  ↩

Samsung Unveils Passbook-Like "Wallet"

Dan Seifert, writing for The Verge:

"The Wallet app is designed to let users store things such as event tickets, boarding passes, membership cards, and coupons in one central location, much in the same fashion as Apple's Passbook app for iOS."

Jordan Kahn of 9to5Google:

"As for the Apple influence, aside from the look and feel of the app and icon (pictured above), the Samsung Wallet app doesn’t seem to provide any additional functionality above and beyond what Passbook already offers."

Passbook has been around for a while now, but I have yet to be impressed by it in my personal life. In fact, I think it was a pretty poor launch on Apple's part.

Say what you want about their penchant for copying Apple, but this could have been Samsung's chance to blow the competition out of the water. Sounds like they blew it.