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

Apple Releases Migration Assistant Update Ahead of Lion’s Launch

At the Q3 2011 earnings call, Apple confirmed OS X Lion is coming tomorrow on the Mac App Store. As noted by MacRumors, a few minutes before the call started Apple pushed an update for Migration Assistant to Snow Leopard users, fixing an issue that prevented the correct transfer of personal data and apps from a Snow Leopard computer to a Mac running Lion.

This update addresses an issue with the Migration Assistant application in Mac OS X Snow Leopard that prevents transfer of your personal data, settings, and compatible applications from a Mac running Mac OS X Snow Leopard to a new Mac running Mac OS X Lion.

The lightweight update can be downloaded now on Snow Leopard from Software Update, or directly from Apple’s website.

Apple Confirms: OS X Lion Coming Tomorrow

At the Q3 2011 earnings call, Apple just confirmed OS X Lion is launching tomorrow, July 20th. The OS will be available on the Mac App Store at $29.99.

OS X Lion is a major upgrade to Apple’s desktop operating system which introduces over 250 new user features and brings several interface and navigation schemes from iOS devices like the iPad, to the Mac’s multi-touch trackpad and desktop environment. Among the notable changes in Lion, also highlighted on Apple’s website, are the Launchpad and Mission Control, two new ways to launch and organize application and windows, respectively. Lion adds a new file sharing system called “AirDrop” baked into the Finder to share files and documents with nearby Macs, and the Finder itself has been finely tuned and improved to sport a more subtle window UI, new file and folder merging functionalities, and a new “All My Files” view that collects all the documents and media found on your computer in a single screen.

Lion also represents a big change for OS X developers: with new APIs and features like Sandboxing, Automatic Termination and Resume, app makers will be able to rewrite their software taking advantage of the new user experience enhancements brought by Apple to the desktop. For instance, apps can now automatically save their “state” upon quitting – meaning accidental shut downs and force-quits will no longer affect the document you were working on. Combined with Auto Save and Version, this opens to a lot more possibilities when it comes to dealing with documents stored on your computer.

Apple Q3 2011 Results: $28.57 Billion Revenue, 20.34 Million iPhones, 9.25 Million iPads, 3.95 Million Macs Sold

Apple has just posted their Q3 2011 financial results. The company posted record-breaking revenue of $28.57 billion, with 9.25 million iPads, 20.34 million iPhones and 3.95 million Macs sold. Apple reported record quarterly net profit of $7.31 billion, or $7.79 per diluted share. Wall Street consensus’ estimate was earnings of $5.80 per share and revenue of $24.92 billion. The company posted record quarterly revenue of $28.57 billion and record quarterly net profit of $7.31 billion, or $7.79 per diluted share.

In Q2 2011, the company said they expected revenue of about $23 billion and diluted earnings per share of about $5.03 in the third fiscal quarter of 2011.

From the results, iPhone is growing 142% year over year, and with 9.25 million units sold the iPad saw a 183% increase over the year-ago quarter. Apple sold sold 7.54 million iPods with a 20% unit decline. The third quarter has been the best non-holiday Mac quarter ever, best iPhone quarter ever, best iPad quarter ever. There are now 28.7 million iPads out there, including 14 million units shipped this calendar year.

In Q2 2011, the company posted revenue of $24.67 billion with 4.69 million iPads, 18.65 million iPhones and 4.69 million Macs sold. In the year-ago quarter, Apple posted revenue of $15.7 billion and net quarterly profit of $3.25 billion. The company sold 3.47 million Macs, 8.4 million iPhones and 3.27 million iPads, which began selling during the quarter.

Apple will provide a live audio feed of its Q3 2011 conference call at 2:00 PM Pacific, and we’ll update this story with the conference highlights. Full press release is embedded after the break. Read more

Official Google+ App for iPhone Now Available

Google has just released the official Google+ app for iPhone on the App Store. The app is free and available here, and at the moment of writing this Google hasn’t updated its Mobile webpage to showcase the new app yet.

The Google+ iOS app provides a native interface to access much of the functionalities of the website, such as the Huddle group messaging feature – which was exclusive to Android devices prior to the app’s approval. The dashboard of the Google+ app presents a grid of icons to access the Stream, Huddle, Photos, your Profile and Circles, as well as a Notifications tab at the bottom that will open a vertical list of all your incoming notifications. Whilst much of the navigation seems to rely on web views optimized for the iPhone and fetched by the device, the animations when switching between sections are quite snappy and fast on iOS 4. Just like on the desktop, the Stream provides recent updates from the people you follow and your Circles, allowing you to check for new posts with the popular “pull to refresh gesture” and comment or +1 others’s posts. You can’t +1 from the home page – you have to open a single post and hit the + button in the upper right corner, while a text field at the bottom will let you leave a comment. You can also “mute” or “report” a post. The app is capable of sending push notifications for new comments, shares, and so forth. Read more

Lion Signage Appears At Italian Retailer Ahead Of Official Launch

As reported by Italian website Macity [a Google translation is not possible as Macity seems to have pulled the article before we could generate a link, Google cache here] the first promotional material for OS X Lion has been set up in advance at Italian retail chain Euronics in Taranto, at the Mongolfiera shopping mall. Whilst recent rumors have pegged the new OS for a Wednesday launch (tomorrow), Apple hasn’t confirmed any official release date, nor did they authorize retailers to showcase signage ahead of the much anticipated launch. It appears, as Macity reports, that employees at Euronics wrongly set up the signage before the rumored launch date, as machines spotted in the electronics section of the shopping mall haven’t even been correctly updated for Lion (they’re still running OS X 10.6.6, whilst 10.6.8 is a requirement to update to the new OS).

The signage touts Lion’s biggest new features such as multi-touch gestures, Launchpad and Mission Control. The banners say “Now on every new Mac”, reinforcing speculation that new computers will be released shortly after the new OS, running Lion by default as a rumor previously claimed. The banners also encourage users to try out Lion, heavily promoting with photos the various multitasking gestures enabled in the OS.

According to recent reports, Apple has shipped hard drives containing Lion to retail stores so that employees can install the OS on store floor machines. Others also report “overnights” are planned later today to train retail staff on Lion, and change in-store promotional material for the (alleged) launch tomorrow morning. New MacBook Airs (as well as new Thunderbolt-equipped Cinema Displays) are expected to launch alongside Lion as well.

Fantastical Adds Lion Support, And We’re Giving Away 10 Codes

Fantastical is a calendar assistant that works with Apple’s iCal and the popular third-party BusyCal software, allowing you to quickly creates event in your default system calendar with plain English. Thanks to a built-in natural language parser, Fantastical lets you write down something like “Get a new MacBook Air tomorrow at Apple Store at 5 PM”, and see the sentence becoming a new event with all the necessary fields already filled in your calendar. And because Fantastical directly plugs into calendar accounts configured on your Mac, you won’t need to enter your information again.

Fantastical 1.0.3, released today, adds full Lion compatibility and a new Lion-only feature that allows you to swipe with two fingers to move between months in the calendar. The animation is really nice, and reminds me of Safari’s new feature for navigating webpages with a two-finger swipe on Lion. Among various bug fixes, Fantastical also adds a new color menubar icon preference, a last-selected calendar option, and several parsing engine fixes.

You can read our initial review of Fantastical here, and buy the app from the Mac App Store. However, the Flexibits developers have been kind enough to offer 10 promo codes to celebrate the next major release of OS X with MacStories readers, so if you’re interested in the giveaway jump after the break for the full details of how to enter. Read more

Sparrow 1.3 Brings Lion Support, Interface Changes

Sparrow started out as a minimal, Tweetie-like email experiment for Mac back in October of last year and, following the success of the public beta, eventually evolved into a powerful desktop solution to access Gmail and IMAP email accounts using new interface concepts inspired by iOS apps, Mac gems like Twitter and Reeder, or other changes previewed by Apple in Lion. As we reported in our previous coverage, the latest big update to the app, Sparrow 1.2, went as far as adding social support with Facebook integration,  Gravatar support, and more.

Sparrow 1.3 was approved yesterday, but the developers had to quickly pull it from sale as a critical bug that caused the app to crash was discovered. After apologizing for the technical error and uploading a patched version for non-Mac App Store users, the team announced a fix had been already submitted with the request of an expedited review from Apple. Personally, I updated to Sparrow 1.3 yesterday and didn’t experience any issues, but I decided to hold my coverage until the promised fix would be available on the App Store – more importantly, the entire app had to come back on Apple’s servers as the developers pulled it to make sure no one would install a “buggy” version. Read more

Stylapps, A Beautiful Showcase of Stylish iPad Apps

As a geek, I’m always excited about the next great app that may solve one of the annoyances in my workflow or provide a better solution to a problem I didn’t know I had. Whilst functionality is still king when it comes down to choosing the proper tools to administer our workflows and check things off our to-do manager, more often than not we’re also looking for beautiful software that meets our iOS expectations for elegant interfaces and intuitive navigation schemes. Stylapps, a free iPad app released in late June, aggregates “stylish iPad applications” that are becoming increasingly difficult to find in the tumultuous sea of daily App Store releases.

Stylapps starts up with an elegant grid of iPad screenshots placed against a light background that greatly contributes to enhancing the colors of the apps that are being presented on screen. The app comes with refresh and search buttons to find your way through specific releases, but more importantly there is a filter icon in the upper left corner that allows you to pick certain categories to check out new apps released on the App Store and hand-picked by Stylapps. So if you don’t want to learn about stylish new Games, but you’re in for a Productivity and Business treat, you can drill down into the aforementioned categories and start looking for new apps that may suit your needs. Screenshots in the main page are large enough to provide a quick preview of what you’re looking at, however you can also tap on a thumbnail to open a single-app view with description, iTunes screenshots, App Store button and a link back to the developer’s website. To go back to the main list, you just have to swipe your finger on screen; a two-finger swipe lets you jump 10 pages of app picks. A “star” button next to each thumbnail enables you to save an app to your favorites, a section that lives locally on your iPad to collect apps you may want to check out later.

Stylapps’ curated section of beautiful and stylish apps quite resembles my tastes, but in my tests I’ve found the app to be far from perfect as far as stability goes. I’ve experienced a few crashes when navigating between pages, and a bug with opening screenshots will sometime “freeze” the app into a lightbox overlay mode that will force you to quit and re-open.

Still, these issues occurred rarely and I was able to browse the selection of software offered by Stylapps to find some interesting new apps I hadn’t covered here on MacStories. Stylapps is free, looks very nice on the iPad, and it’ll probably help you find the next gorgeous app you didn’t know about.

Airfoil, Reemote and AirPlay: A Multi-Speaker Wireless Setup

When I first covered the 4.5 update for Airfoil, which added extended AirPlay support and remote controls for compatible apps, a reader suggested an interesting hack or, better, workflow for wireless audio in the comments: given Airfoil’s capability of sending audio from a single source to multiple speakers or devices at once, it was possible to send audio from iOS to the Mac using AirServer, and then pass along data from AirServer (which acts as an AirPlay receiver on the Mac) to speakers recognized by Airfoil. Later, another reader chimed in to say that, considering Airfoil’s recent improvements, there was no need to install a separate app – Airfoil Speakers itself could handle the AirPlay stream from iOS to OS X, and then be used as an input source in Airfoil. When combined with an app like Reemote, this setup would allow you to send audio from an iPhone or iPad to the Mac wirelessly, from the Mac to another set of speakers or computers, and then control everything from iOS. Read more