Apple Invites is at its best for people already in Apple’s world
Most of you have an Apple iPhone in your hand or a Mac on your desk. And chances you’ve got a birthday or a special event coming. If you’re thinking of sending out an event invite, you might as well try Apple’s new Invites app, which launched today. The app almost replaces ad-filled third-party options like Evite and Partiful, at least for Apple users, to corral folks together in the well-coifed, walled garden way.
According to our sources, Apple Invites will allow up to three users to be event organizers. We’ll see integration from Apple Photos with shared albums, and we expect Apple Music integration for shared playlists as well.
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Apple will pitch the feature as being useful for creating online party invitations like for baby showers, birthdays, and graduation parties. Attendees will not need an Apple Account or Ap ple device to respond to an Apple Invite either.
The basic idea behind the tool is to bring together many capabilities from across Apple’s ecosystem — from photos, to music, to maps, to weather — and use them to create and share invitations, while also operating as a kind of digital portal for your event.
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Your guests will not only be able to RSVP to your custom invitation, but can contribute to a shared album during and after your gathering. You can even allow them to contribute to a shared Apple Music playlist for your party — although we suggest using your discretion with this one.
Pick a name for the event, the date and time, and don’t forget to establish a location. Once that’s in there, Invites will populate information on the weather outlook for that specific day, and a quick Apple Maps shortcut will be provided so people can see where they need to be. You can select to add a collaborative Apple Music playlist and/or Photos album, which you can pre-populate with pictures to help set the stage for the event.
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The iCloud integration for Apple Invites lets you start the invitation on the web and finish it later on the iPhone. If your connection is solid, it’s instantaneous for all devices pinging the cloud. When you’re done setting up the invitation, you can invite people from other platforms to RSVP using a shareable link or from your contacts. I sent the link to some friends and colleagues to see how the RSVP mechanism works. The only person who had trouble with Apple Invites was on a developer account, which required them to log in to see it. Everyone else was able to pop in and leave their reply.