Federico Viticci

10804 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

Jean-Louis Gassée on App Store Curation→

Jean-Louis Gassée, in his open letter to Tim Cook:

Instead of using algorithms to sort and promote the apps that you permit on your shelves, why not assign a small group of adepts to create and shepherd an App Store Guide, with sections such as Productivity, Photography, Education, and so on. Within each section, this team of respected but unnamed (and so “ungiftable”) critics will review the best-in-class apps. Moreover, they’ll offer seasoned opinions on must-have features, UI aesthetics, and tips and tricks. A weekly newsletter will identify notable new titles, respond to counter-opinions, perhaps present a developer profile, footnote the occasional errata and mea culpa…

Good points, and not the first time Gassée has used the Michelin guide as an example of the human curation that could improve the App Store’s recommendations.

Gassée doesn’t mention the upcoming Explore section of the iOS 8 App Store, and I believe that is going to provide an interesting mix of the classic category-based organization with curation through sub-categories and editorial picks for specific “app types”.

Unsurprisingly, Explore is going to replace Near Me in the middle tab of the App Store app for iOS 8: Near Me will be integrated into Explore, and it will likely extend as part of a new system to advertise apps relevant to your location on the Lock screen. Free of the limited scope of Near Me, Explore will enable the App Store team to offer a full-blown index of app categories that are easily accessible from a dedicated view.

It is my understanding that Explore will feature a mix of the curated app collections Apple has been building for the past couple of years and new filters for app types. Starting with the basic list of App Store categories, you’ll be able to drill down into more specific sub-categories with multiple levels of depth, such as “Music > DJs” or “Productivity > Task Management > GTD”.

While Apple may not be considering a full-blown, standalone App Store Guide as a regular publication, iOS 8’s Explore section is showing encouraging signs of new curation efforts that account for the incredible variety of the App Store’s catalogue, but it remains to be seen whether customers will take the time to explore the Explore section.

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Recommending Music on Spotify with Deep Learning→

This summer, I’m interning at Spotify in New York City, where I’m working on content-based music recommendation using convolutional neural networks. In this post, I’ll explain my approach and show some preliminary results.

A fascinating post by Sander Dieleman explaining how he designed a deep neural network to provide music recommendations based on Spotify data. It’s a technical read, but there are Spotify player widgets to listen to songs picked up by the network, which is capable of learning specific pitches, chords, sounds, and other factors such as Chinese voices. Dieleman says that hopefully some of these audio-based recommendations will go into A/B testing soon, with a focus on recommending new music that isn’t generally picked up by traditional recommendation engines. Impressive.

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Four Years in Apple’s Ecosystem→

An interesting and well documented experiment by The Typist: a visualization of four years of purchases on the iTunes Store, and particularly the App Store. I can’t imagine the amount of effort that went into this (sifting through 90 emails, recalculating prices based on past currency conversions, etc.), but I hope I’ll have the patience to do the same someday.

The Typist makes a great point about iOS games:

So what does that mean for games? Of the 34 that I’ve purchased, only 5 games — worth $18 — are currently installed on either of my iOS devices. Of the $111.66 that I’ve spent, $93.71 worth of games are on neither of my devices. Almost 84% of the money I’ve spent on games is now in the cloud.

Does that mean I wouldn’t have bought any or most of them? Not necessarily: That would be like not going to the movies because you pay $12 for 120 minutes that you can’t “reuse”. Most forms of entertainment are ephemeral by nature.

Unlike console games, I can’t remember any old iOS game that I intentionally redownloaded to play it again like I do for, say, Nintendo or Squaresoft classics. Maybe it’s just me, or maybe it’s the nature of mobile games. Also worth considering: old iOS games that don’t work properly on current versions of the OS, that don’t have Retina assets, or that rely on third-party services no longer in existence (the last one is a problem common to console games, too).

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Pinterest Launches Messaging Feature→

In an update released yesterday on the App Store, Pinterest rolled out a messaging feature that allows people to share pins privately and have discussions around them.

Casey Newton has a good overview:

Starting today, the company is rolling out messages on Android, iOS, and the web. Like Facebook’s “chat heads,” recent messages pop up to the left of the feed as bubbles with your friends’ faces. You’ll find the others under the pin icon where notifications pop up. Just click the ‘+’ icon, type in the name of a friend on Pinterest, and you can send a pin or a standalone message. The impressive thing about Pinterest messages is that the pins you send within the app retain all the functionality of a pin you see anywhere else on the site. Anything you can do with a pin on Pinterest’s web site, you can do inside a message: pin it to a board of your own, send it to another friend, or click the ‘heart’ to add it to your list of favorites. You can even drag a pin from the site into a message.

Pinterest is the only social network that I’m genuinely excited about lately. I’ve been using Pinterest a lot in the past few months, and it strikes me as a company that knows what people want and how they really use the service. Everything about it is friendly, comfortable, and practical; the fact that I can talk about Pinterest with my “normal” friends without getting the blank stares I receive for Twitter also helps.

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Shazam for Mac: Background Song Recognition in the Menu Bar

I was surprised to hear last week that Shazam, makers of the popular music recognition app that’s going to be integrated with Siri in iOS 8, had launched a desktop app for OS X, available for free on the Mac App Store. I always associated Shazam with the portability and instant-on nature of the iPhone: you hear a song playing, you want to know what it is, you pull out Shazam and let it work its magic. That’s why I’ve never managed to get used to Shazam on the iPad and why I seldom use all the features that the company has tacked onto the app over the years: fundamentally, I see Shazam as the music recognition app for iPhone, and that’s it.

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“Buy All The Things”→

Stuart Hall:

Much has been written about being an indie developer on the App Store recently, with not much of it positive.

I think this experiment has shown us a few really important things.

Since last year, I’ve continued to follow Stuart’s experiment with great interest. While not indicative of the indie app market as a whole, his experience can be useful to understand the impact of In-App Purchases, pricing experimentation, and cutting down on non-development or design costs, such as customer support, through the built-in AppbotX service (our coverage). Stuart’s app has reached almost 2 million downloads and $60,000 in revenue.

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Simogo’s Next Game: The Sailor’s Dream→

Simogo, makers of some of my favorite games for iOS (Year Walk and DEVICE 6), have announced their next game, The Sailor’s Dream, launching later this year. The Sailor’s Dream will be a “challenge-free experience in which you explore a non-linear story through words, music, sounds and illustrations”, and, based on the trailer and screenshots seen so far, it looks like Simogo is once again trying to redefine the scope of innovation in mobile gaming.

Don’t miss Leigh Alexander’s interview with Simogo at Gamasutra, which provides background and context on the studio’s latest creation:

“We want it to feel both relaxing, like diving into a tiny little world in which you can enjoy just interacting with, looking at and listening to things,” Flesser continues. “But then there’s also this element of exploring a quiet story, and tying it together in your head. So in that way it is like a dream, exploring a strange world, with tiny bits of reality breaking through in different ways.”

You can watch the trailer below, and check out the game’s first screenshots at the official website. You can read my review of Year Walk, Simogo’s hit from 2013, here.

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