Federico Viticci

906 posts on MacStories since April 2009

Federico is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of MacStories, where he writes about Apple with a focus on apps, developers, iPad, and iOS productivity. He founded MacStories in April 2009 and has been writing about Apple since. Federico is also the co-host of AppStories, a weekly podcast exploring the world of apps, Unwind, a fun exploration of media and more, and NPC: Next Portable Console, a show about portable gaming and the handheld revolution.

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HootSuite for iPhone: the Owl for Professional Users

So you’re really serious about Social Media. You manage your brand’s Twitter profile, you have a blog or a personal portfolio to promote, you’ve just set up a Facebook page (speaking of which, here’s MacStories Facebook page) and you need to post your updates to both these social networks. As you should probably know there are many webapps out there which claim to be the “ultimate solution for professionals” but let’s face it: there are only 2 great web applications out there, CoTweet and HootSuite. They’re meant for people who need a powerful management tool for their social identities, providing features like support for contributors on the same account (long before Twitter decided to implement it by default) and email notifications. I’ve actually tested both CoTweet and HootSuite and guys, HootSuite is far better if you need to track your business on social profiles.

Today I’ll talk about HootSuite’s recently released iPhone application, priced at $1.99, which brings many features of HootSuite.com to your mobile device, with a very good user interface.

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Caffeinated: The Next Big Thing in RSS Readers for Mac?

I wrote many times how much I’m into Ember app: it’s a great place to find inspirational stuff and work in progress screenshots of Mac and iPhone applications. So, the other day I was browsing the Images section and stumbled upon this screenie of a RSS app for Mac  I never saw before: damn, it was sexy.

I tried to gather some additional info and I found out it was a screenshot of a working build of Caffeinated, an application that’s being developed by Curtis Hard. He was so kind to give me a quick preview of Caffeinated and guys - this one’s gonna be amazing.

Find out why.

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Interview with Jürgen Schweizer, Developer of Things for Mac

As a part of the MacStories Apps Tree event (where you’ll find a huge giveaway worth $10.000 of 300 Mac and iPhone apps licenses), I had the chance to interview Jürgen Schweizer, the developer of  Things, the best Getting Things Done application for Mac OS X. You can read a great review of Things here.

This is 2nd of many interviews and guest posts I’ll publish on MacStories during this week. Enjoy!

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An Ode to Droplr from Chris Bowler

Really nice and brief overview from Chris Bowler, who prefers Droplr over Cloud app. And like I said yesterday, Droplr is currently better than Cloud, let’s see if this is gonna change.

“I’ve been using either Droplr or Cloud for the past 3 months and both are great tools. But Droplr comes out ahead in a few ways. For those who haven’t caught the bug yet,here’s a list of things I regularly use Droplr for.

- Shorten URLs — every link I post in Twitter comes from Droplr. This way I can track what I’ve shared and how often it’s been clicked. Other URL shorteners do this for you, but Droplr includes this service in with everything else it does.

- No more attachments — do you have files that you regularly attach to emails? Rather than make slow emails, just upload your file to Droplr and include the link in the email.”


Mindnode Winners Announced

First, thanks everyone for the support and the comments! Then, I’d like to thank the Mindnode team for giving us these 3 promo codes for the giveaway.

Now, here are the winners:

Peter Steen Høgenhaug

Fabianaco

Christi M

You’ll receive the U.S. promo code straight in your inbox in a matter of a few minutes.

Cheers!


Even More on Pastebot

From Shawn Blanc’s review:

- Text: Even thousands of words copy over quickly, and text is the only data type that you can copy from one mac and past to another using Pastebot as the middle-man.

- Images: Copying a photo from within iPhoto will send the actual picture. Though the title of the image from iPhoto does not transfer. Copying a whole slew of images from iPhoto gives Pastebot a datatype that it doesn’t recognize. However, it still maintains the data. For example, I copied 9 images from iPhoto, they showed up in Pastebot as unknown Mac data, but from there I was still able to paste them onto my Desktop. Also, copying an image from Preview will get the full image onto your iPhone and allow you to use it on your iPhone. But copying the image file from the Finder only sends the file-type icon.

- Audio and Video: Copying an audio or video file from iTunes sends the metadata to Pastebot. But it’s metadata based on where in iTunes the file was copied from.

On the other hand, if you copy an audio or video file from within the Finder it sends that file’s relevant icon to Pastebot. And if you then paste that icon back to the Finder, it will paste the audio or video file; pasting it when in a plain text document will paste the filename; pasting it in a rich text document or an email will attach the file; and trying to paste into iTunes does nothing.

- Folders & Zip Files: You can copy an entire folder or zip file. It shows up in Pastebot as a folder or zip icon, but pasting it back to the Finder the whole folder, with all its contents, shows up unscathed.

You can email a file that Pastebot itself doesn’t recognize but it gets sent as an icon file. Sending a ZIP file you copied into Pastebot will only send the 512×512 icon titled as filename.zip. Similarly, sending a folder sends the icon of a folder named after the folder you had copied.

- PDFs: Copying a page of a PDF document from within Preview will send that actual page. You can then paste it into the finder and you’ll get the page as if it were dragged out from Preview.

Pretty powerful, huh?