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

Ecoute 2 Review

Ecoute 2

Ecoute 2

Last year, when we reviewed Ecoute, we called it the best music player for iOS. Apple’s Music app has never been packed with features when compared to iTunes on the Mac, but it’s the app that the majority of people use because it’s free and built into the operating system.

With iOS 7, Apple redesigned the Music app with some questionable choices for artist and album navigation and more advantages over third-party clients through the inclusion of iTunes Radio streaming and a special widget in Control Center to like songs and add them to your wish list. The Music app is, effectively, irreplaceable if you care about iTunes Radio and managing your music and playlists, but I think that the new Ecoute for iOS 7 does several things better than Apple’s app. Read more

Yahoo Weather 1.5 Adds iPad Support→

Yahoo Weather, winner of an Apple Design Award at WWDC ‘13, has been updated today to version 1.5, which adds a native interface for the iPad, making the app Universal. I was a fan of the app before, and it’s good to see Yahoo releasing it on the iPad – a platform that Apple doesn’t think deserves its own built-in Weather app.

The iPad version is nothing revolutionary as it uses the same Flickr-powered photographic approach seen on the iPhone, making interface elements bigger and more spaced out. There are, however, some fun new transitions when scrolling through weather information on the iPad – such as columns of text sliding in from the sides of the screen and animated raindrop icons – that make the experience more fun on the iPad. These animations haven’t been enabled on the iPhone, likely due to screen constraints.

Yahoo Weather is free on the App Store.

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Tydlig: An Innovative Free-Form Calculator for iOS

Tydlig

Tydlig

Developed by Andreas Karlsson, Tydlig wants to reimagine how a calculator should work in the modern age of iOS devices and multitouch screens. Rather than mimicking every aspect of old physical calculators in the transition to pixels, Tydlig eschews conventions by turning an iPhone or iPad’s screen into a canvas where numbers can be placed anywhere, linked together, and rearranged. The result is a breath of fresh air into the landscape of iOS calculators, but it also takes a while to get used to it and it likely won’t appease purists. Read more

Introducing A 27-Year-Old Computer To The Web→

Jeff Keacher:

Reviving an old computer is like restoring a classic car: there’s a thrill from bringing the ancient into the modern world. So it was with my first “real” computer, my Mac Plus, when I decided to bring it forward three decades and introduce it to the modern web.

In 2040, will people try to connect 27-year-old iPads to the web?

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App Store Optimization→

Dan Counsell:

An app’s name, and the keywords it uses are some of the biggest influencers in search results; all the research I’ve done suggests that the download volume acts as a multiplier on the name and keyword match. For example, If two apps have the same keyword (and rating), the app with the most downloads will come out on top — I’ve experienced this first hand with Clear for iPhone & Clear+ for iOS.

These are some good tips by Dan for third-party developers. I think the bigger theme is that the App Store is now so large, apps have to be treated like websites for a search engine with optimization tricks. This also explains why so many developers run regular promotions or agree to “free app of the week” initiatives (either official or not) – download numbers matter for long-term survival.

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Party DJ Brings iTunes DJ Feature Back to iOS 7 With App for iPhone and iPad

Party DJ

Party DJ

Developed by Alex Price, Party DJ is an iOS 7 app that brings back one of the old features of iTunes DJ and Apple’s Remote app: the possibility to collaborate with friends on what music to play through a voting system. The app, available today on the App Store, comes in two versions: a paid, $1.99 “host + remote” app to handle playback and queue management, and a free Remote companion to install on iPhones or iPads that can vote songs. Price is the developer behind CameraSync, a longtime favorite of mine, and I was immediately intrigued when he showed me Party DJ a few weeks back. Read more

DaisyDisk 3

DaisyDisk

DaisyDisk

I’ve been using DaisyDisk for years now. Developed by a small team, DaisyDisk is a disk analyzer tool that manages to make the boring process of understanding what’s wasting space on your hard drive pretty and almost fun. We’ve covered the app quite a few times on MacStories over the years, and the basic functionality hasn’t changed, but we missed the 3.0 update released in September and I wanted to fix that. Read more

Better Two-Factor Authentication with Authy for iOS and OS X

In my list of Must-Have iPad Apps for 2013, I mentioned Authy and two-factor authentication:

Authy. If you’re not using two-step authentication for online services that support it, you’re doing it wrong. And if you assume that the ugly Google Authenticator app is the only way to generate one-time security codes, well, let me tell you about Authy. Simple and well designed, Authy is “a Google Authenticator app” in that it can generate codes for services, like Evernote and Dropbox, that would normally ask you to use Google’s app. Authy is secure and fully compliant with the standards required by two-step authentication; it has a clean UI, it’s free and Universal, and it comes with a Mac utility to share codes locally over Bluetooth.

Because it’s an app that I use every day, I thought that Authy deserved a separate mention on the site; I replaced Google’s terrible Authenticator app with Authy, which provides a cleaner interface, support for multiple devices, and a Mac utility to share tokens using Bluetooth Low Energy. Read more