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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Twitter Client Comes to Mac OS 9. Retroapps.

Grackle68k is a Twitter client which supports Mac OS 6 to Mac OS 9. Here are some screenshots:

And here’s a mockup of Tweetie running on Mac OS 9:

I remember I heard of someone many years ago who was tryin’ to port Nintendo GC games to the old NES. They called him “crazy”.

Is this the beginning of retroapps?


MacRuby

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MacRuby is a version of Ruby 1.9, ported to run directly on top of Mac OS X core technologies such as the Objective-C common runtime and garbage collector, and the CoreFoundation framework. While still a work in progress, it is the goal of MacRuby to enable the creation of full-fledged Mac OS X applications which do not sacrifice performance in order to enjoy the benefits of using Ruby.

Hey developers, this seems interesting.


Camino 2.0 Available

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Firefox little brother for Mac, Camino, has finally reached version 2.0. There are many improvements, including a tab overview feature and a better Applescript support. I never used Camino for more than 2 hours, mostly beacuse it was just a little copy of its older brother.

I’m curious about this 2.0 update.

If you use Camino, be sure to check out these beautiful toolbar icons by Matthew Rex.


iTunes Pro

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“They can keep growing the free iTunes in other directions if they want to, such as the App Store, movies, etc. But for serious music lovers with an appetite for pro-level music library management software, there needs to be an alternative.”

Great post from Betalogue, though I believe Apple won’t release such a thing anytime soon.

The problem is, music library organising isn’t seen as “professional task” (it is for me, I’d pay for someone to organise my music library. God knows how many times I wished I had a well sorted iTunes while recording with my band) and for this reason Cupertino doesn’t think people would ever need a pro version of iTunes. More important, they don’t care about the fact that iTunes has many problems and needs serious fixes, so it’s not all about “more actions”.

It’s about more stability. And of course, a pro look.

I’d love to have my own music encyclopedia.


Quicksilver b57 Available

Thanks to @elasticthreads I’ve just found out that Quicksilver b57 is available. The popular app launcher has finally gone out of the alpha and seems like it re-emerged with a group of open source developers. I’m gonna look into this.

I’m testing this new beta right now and it feels faster than ever. QS has indexed my Mac in less than 1 minute and overall the app is so very stable.

Anyway, here’s the official discussion. You can download the latest build here.



How Microsoft Blew It With Windows Mobile

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“Hoddie compared Windows Mobile to the iPhone, whose apps he described as “beautiful,” which encourages third-party developers to produce apps of similar quality.

He added that Microsoft’s second problem is segmentation in the hardware ecosystem. Windows Mobile ships with several different manufacturers’ hardware, including HTC, LG and Samsung. The problem? From a developer perspective, that requires coding an app for several phones with different UI styles, buttons and screen sizes. (The same problem, incidentally, has started to plague Android developers.)

That would give the iPhone another advantage: The iPhone operates on a closed system, which can only run on Apple hardware, meaning third-party developers can produce apps and games that work exclusively with the iPhone. Therefore, despite Apple’s questionable and controversial approval policy for iPhone apps, developers can code one app that works with 40 million iPhone and iPod Touch devices, which is less time consuming than developing several versions of one app for a variety of Windows Mobile smartphones. In turn, that spells out to a larger number of apps in the App Store, which enables Apple’s hardware to cater to a larger and broader audience.

The inability to recognize the new smartphone audience is another one of Microsoft’s flaws, Rubin said. Microsoft’s mobile OS history is rooted in personal digital assistants, which were marketed toward enterprise audiences. Today, the smartphone has shifted into the mainstream as a consumer device, and yet Windows Mobile is still largely focused on enterprise features.”

Great piece from Brian Chen (Wired) which describes very well the situation of Windows Mobile. You know, closed systems are better sometimes.


Reportage: Elite Tweets On Your iPhone

I really don’t know how many Twitter clients for iPhone are available in the AppStore. 2000? 3000? Most of them are unusable apps, Twitter.com ripoffs sold as native apps or even ugly copies of other applications. Then there’s the elite, the “Upper East Side” of Twitter clients: you can see Tweetie, Twitterrific, Twittelator, Birdbrain and Twitbit walking there. They’re feature rich apps, with awesome interfaces and great ideas.

Now, developing an elitè Twitter app for iPhone nowadays is hard: I mean, you have to face Loren Brichter, and this is not exactly what people call “an easy task”. But a few developers understood that the big deal is not goin’ against Tweetie: it’s developing an application users would use together with Tweetie. Something different, yet usable and sexy.

Meet Reportage.

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