The brilliance of stuff that just works

The ticket as it popped up on my
phone (original not pixilated)

A few years ago, when I first moved over to using Apple, a friend of mine who likes to get up to his elbows in the technology, tweaking this and twerking that, said 'I could never live with that walled garden.' He wasn't talking about some rural pleasure grounds, but rather the way that Apple rigidly controls what does what on its devices.

I can see the point if you are the sort of person who likes to nurgle around changing settings and writing macros and linking box X to widget Y to make things just the way you want them. And I probably was that person in my 20s. But now I just want things to work together, and with a few notable exceptions, the good thing about using Apple is that it all does.

I just had an example of that. I had received an e-ticket notification from Eurostar. On the email it said 'click here to download your ticket'. I did this on my iMac. Up popped a web window showing the ticket. This had a link on it saying 'Click here to send the ticket to your wallet.' Yeah, right, I thought. So I clicked the link. And five seconds later, there was a ticket sitting in the Wallet app on my phone.

I'm not saying this wouldn't necessarily work as well with Android or Windows - it may well do so. But for me, that ability to click a link on my desktop and have a ticket appear as if by magic in the wallet on the phone is why the walled garden can be a lovely place to live.

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