> For one, Apple was unwilling to have visible barcodes printed on the envelopes — but it wanted every step of the shipping and delivery of your card tracked. That wasn’t something the US Postal Service did. Apple and the printing company created an invisible barcode that was sprayed on the envelope, visible only under certain UV light, so that the envelope itself would remain unadulterated. And the USPS agreed to scan cards when sent, when processed at mail facilities, up to and including when they went out on a mail truck for delivery.
Someone who cares about the barcode tends to care about other details. In some ways it's like the band riders that have silly things like no brown m&m's.
Not only an untrue statement, but also a sadly incurious way to approach someone else's design choice. Yes, it was an enormous amount of work and invention to achieve a desired effect, but the effect is striking in an environment that is otherwise plastered with everyday visual clutter.
Minimalism is difficult and expensive to achieve. Some people consider that effort worthwhile.
I dunno. Premium products are a difficult thing. I can't weigh in because I don't care about cards at all, I'd much rather receive a wedding invitation via e-mail yet people spend hundreds on custom cards on thick card, custom printing etc etc. In fact, some couples are insistent on getting their envelopes "hand cancelled" so they look crisp and clean when they arrive at their destination:
As the co-founder of Sincerely (at this time in 2011), I remember this keynote very specifically because it felt like we'd been Sherlocked. We were busy building out Postagram and Sincerely Ink, both from-iPhone-to-printed-card apps. afaik we were the first app to do this, and we were at that time gaining a lot of momentum. I remember seeing the announcement for Cards and feeling a mix of fear and anger that it felt like Apple was using their clout to take our idea.
I seem to recall my co-founder being somewhat more optimistic about the whole thing. And sure enough, we found that the announcement really only seemed to boost awareness.
Apple Cards was an extremely limited and flawed product, and we already had some distinct technical and feature set advantages. It was clear Apple didn't have their heart in it nor know what they were doing. When they retired it shortly thereafter it wasn't a shock, and I ironically recall feeling somewhat sad.
I worked on a similar project for a non-profit at a previous job. No letterpress though, which I'm kind of bummed about.
The software in this space is execrable (I wrote a TeX tool to do it based on a CSV and it would've been okay if they'd allowed it to run on the server as each order came in, but they insisted instead on ganging things up which added complexity and made the files large enough that csvtool in TeX had a hard time working through them), and dealing with the USPS can be quite thorny, but as noted, customer relations is a potential minefield and managing customer expectations could get really expensive (once we had to pay $800 to have a single card delivered same-day because it was that or lose the contract).
I also argued that we should integrate the preview, generating a pixel image of the actual addresses from the typesetting system so as to push the responsibility for address verification onto the customer, but even though we were doing that for custom order books in a separate project by a different department it was shot down as an unnecessary complexity.
The part of "founder-led" companies nobody talks about. For every groundbreaking tech project, there's 100 other people sleeping in conference rooms working on some rich guy's latest brain-fart that everyone knows will never work.
Pretty sure those folks are just using a digital press and sending things out w/ a bar-coded envelope w/ printed indicia --- as noted in the article, it was the letterpress aspect which set this apart.
Well, sure. But GP says “this type of service” which is indeed available. The exact service would be outrageously expensive, and too few customers would buy at the required prices.
> Apple worked with the US Postal Service and the Czech Post
Like many Apple products, it was a really neat service, but was a PITA to deal with internationally.
This and the photo prints service were the two that really made me ignore the pompous advertisements during the Keynotes. The photo books were also gorgeous, just extremely late, pricey, and dealing with UPS was utterly to exotic for the receiver. I ordered twice and gave up.
Learned to wait for what Apple would actually do outside of their bubble.
This is classic Steve Jobs. Sheer force of will.
Minimalism is difficult and expensive to achieve. Some people consider that effort worthwhile.
https://www.theknot.com/content/hand-cancel-wedding-invitati...
If you're one of those people I could absolutely imagine you'd care about a visible barcode on an envelope.
I seem to recall my co-founder being somewhat more optimistic about the whole thing. And sure enough, we found that the announcement really only seemed to boost awareness.
Apple Cards was an extremely limited and flawed product, and we already had some distinct technical and feature set advantages. It was clear Apple didn't have their heart in it nor know what they were doing. When they retired it shortly thereafter it wasn't a shock, and I ironically recall feeling somewhat sad.
The software in this space is execrable (I wrote a TeX tool to do it based on a CSV and it would've been okay if they'd allowed it to run on the server as each order came in, but they insisted instead on ganging things up which added complexity and made the files large enough that csvtool in TeX had a hard time working through them), and dealing with the USPS can be quite thorny, but as noted, customer relations is a potential minefield and managing customer expectations could get really expensive (once we had to pay $800 to have a single card delivered same-day because it was that or lose the contract).
I also argued that we should integrate the preview, generating a pixel image of the actual addresses from the typesetting system so as to push the responsibility for address verification onto the customer, but even though we were doing that for custom order books in a separate project by a different department it was shot down as an unnecessary complexity.
https://touchnote.com/us/welcome/
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/touchnote-personalized-cards/i...
Like many Apple products, it was a really neat service, but was a PITA to deal with internationally.
This and the photo prints service were the two that really made me ignore the pompous advertisements during the Keynotes. The photo books were also gorgeous, just extremely late, pricey, and dealing with UPS was utterly to exotic for the receiver. I ordered twice and gave up.
Learned to wait for what Apple would actually do outside of their bubble.