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.
@viticci@macstories.net
@viticci.macstories.net
viticci@macstories.net

This Week's Sponsor:

Turbulence Forecast

Know before you go. Get detailed turbulence forecasts for your exact route, now available 5 days in advance.

Adobe AIR 2.0 Goes Public Beta

Link

AIR 2 builds on the success of AIR 1 by giving developers new capabilities, and even tighter integration with the desktop. Some new features of AIR 2 include:

Support for the detection of mass storage devices.

Advanced networking capabilities like secure sockets, UDP support, and the ability to listen on sockets.

Support for native code integration.

The ability to open a file with its default application.

Multi-touch and gesture support.

New APIs for access to raw microphone data.

Webkit update with HTML5/CSS3 support.

Global error handling.

Improved cross-platform printing

Improved security and support for enterprise and government standards.

Time for decent AIR apps?

How To Export Items From Shovebox Mobile and Import Them Into Yojimbo

Thanks to MacHeist, I had the chance to download and test Shovebox, a lightweight organizer for Mac OS X. Then, I found out that there was a Shovebox app for iPhone too, so I decided to give it a try. Expect a review soon.

Anyway, this is not a review of Shovebox mobile. In this tutorial I’ll show you how you can export items from Shovebox mobile and import them into Yojimbo on your Mac. As you can guess, Shovebox mobile + Yojimbo could become the ultimate data organizer setup: every data you shove on the go can be easily imported into Yojimbo on your desktop.

The process is a little bit complex and it’s based on an Automator workflow I created, but once you’ve set up everything it will take 2 seconds to export/import all the files.

Enjoy!

Read more

BetterTouchTool Brings Gestures to Your Mac Apps

Say you own a Magic Mouse or a multitouch Macbook: gestures are great, aren’t they? You can perform actions by simply tapping / moving your fingers on the multitouch surface and this is a huge time saver in my opinion. Gestures are even better than keyboard shortcuts sometimes.

Now, Mac OS has a big problem with gestures: you can’t assign custom gestures to the applications you like. I mean, why can’t I tell Tweetie to refresh with a simple gesture? Now, I’d hate to say so but..

..There’s an app for that.

Read more

Roundup: 15 Clipboard Managers for Mac OS X

There’s a keyboard shortcut I use everyday, hundreds of times: Cmd + C, Copy. Everyone copies something every single day. Now, if you copy a lot of stuff and you use Mac OS, you should have noticed the lack of a built in clipboard manager which stores all of your copied data enabling you to paste them later.

Fortunately there are many 3rd party clipboard managers that can do this: in this roundup I’ve collected 15 of the most famous clipboard apps available for Mac OS X.

What I was looking while searching for a good clipboard manager was an easy to use app, yet powerful and with a good user interface.

Enjoy!

Read more

How To Create a Lessn, Bit.ly, Is.gd, Tinyurl Desktop Shortener with Applescript

If you daily send a lot of links to your friends / Twitter followers it’s very likely that you’ve started using a URL shortener. It’s fast, easy and so web 2.0 to send a shortened URL, you can’t deny it. But as the url shortening mania exploded, so has the url shortening services: Tinyurl, Bit.ly, Tinyurl, Tr.im, Is.gd, J.mp, there are hundreds of shorteners out there.

Then, there’s the “your own URL shortener” trend: just as I did with mcstr.es, I purchased a short domain and installed lessn from Shaun Inman to generate short urls for MacStories links. Sure, lessn is not the only application which allows to acheive this (Yourls, for example, seems to be used by many people) but I like its interface and installation process more than others.

Now, if there’s one thing all these url shortening services miss it’s a desktop app to shorten links. I mean, an application that supports every service so that the users can choose which one to use.

For this reason I asked @andytuba (website) to build an Applescript for that.

And guess what, it’s awesome.

Read more

Using Snow Leopard’s Built-in Text Snippets in Mail.app

Awesome tips from HawkWings about a Snow Leopard feature a very few users know: text substitution. You can actually enable text substitutions in Mac OS X by default instead of purchasing apps like TextEpander or Typinator. The problem is, not every Cocoa app supports them, so it’s very likely that you’ll end purchasing a third party app.

But anyway, if you’d like to enable them in Mail.app, it’s stupid simple.

Favorite Tweets of the Week Nov 8-Nov 14, 2009

I usually tweet a lot of stuff: apps tutorials, news, videos, reviews, hacks and so much more. Everything that’s Apple-related and it’s interesting, it’s worth a tweet.

To keep up to date with all these links you can follow me on Twitter, but in case you missed here’s a small compilation of the best tweets of the past week.

You can find me on Twitter as @storiesofmac.

Enjoy!

Read more