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

MacStories Black Friday Guide: 150 Great iOS Apps [Update: Mac Apps, Gadgets]

With Thanksgiving just around the corner and that credit card already set up with your iTunes account, it’s impossible to resist the temptation to grab all those discounted apps in the App Store. Indeed, great deals have surfaced this past week and we’re also waiting for Apple to go public with its own Black Friday deals.

We don’t think you should force yourself to not buy all those discounted apps and gadgets because you have to save money for the iPhone 5. No, there’s time for that. We want to offer you a roundup of the best apps we think are currently discounted for Thanksgiving, great pieces of software we have reviewed in the past and you should go buy right now. We haven’t listed any app in here, we have simply collected the ones we love.

So jump after the break, fire up iTunes and check out these amazing deals from the App Store. Read more

What Happened To App Subscriptions? [Video]

Last night we reported Apple is already working on a new build of iOS that should be coming as early as mid-December to support plans for recurring subscriptions in App Store apps. The first app to take advantage of these new options? The Daily by News Corp.

Well, at least that’s what the rumors say, and of course we won’t be hearing anything official from Apple until the day the collaboration with News Corp. goes public. But plans for recurring subscriptions have been going around for a while at Cupertino, although they didn’t play out the way we wanted. Or perhaps Jobs and Forstall wanted. As a matter of fact, yesterday I remembered Forstall had mentioned “subscriptions” as a new business model for developers in iPhone OS 3.0. At the iPhone OS 3.0 preview event in March 2009, he clearly stated that many developers (especially magazine app publishers) were asking for a way to renew subscriptions in-app. So what did those publishers get? Recurring subscriptions? No, they got in-app purchases, which are far from being a way to automatically renew a subscription.

So we took the part from the preview event video where Scott Forstall mentions subscriptions and re-uploaded it. Looking back, it’s not clear whether Apple really saw in-app purchases as a way to automatically renew magazine subscriptions in-app or not. Maybe they wanted recurring subscriptions to be part of the in-app purchase system but they had to remove them from the final version of iPhone OS 3.0. I mean, blogs back then really seemed to think subscriptions were a go. Thing is, Apple hasn’t changed its position since then (not even when the iPad came out) and we think it’s about time to have a proper system for recurring subscriptions tied to iTunes accounts.

Check out the video below. Read more

UberTwitter For iPhone Reminds Us Why We Didn’t Pick A BlackBerry In The First Place

Every day, 10 million tweets are sent using UberTwitter for BlackBerry handsets. Enterprise folks tweet with it (but please remind me why the business dudes tweet, I think I’m missing something here), celebrities tweet with it, the developers were so happy with the popularity of UberTwitter for BlackBerry that they decided to port it to the iPhone.

Now, I’m not usually huge on app portings from one platform to another. I don’t like developers who are successful on the iPhone and convert an app to Android without considering Android’s nature, and I had the same feeling when I heard of UberTwitter for iPhone this morning.

Indeed my feeling was correct. The app is simply ugly, and doesn’t feel right on the iPhone. It tries to be an iPhone app, but I stopped caring the moment I saw floating controls above a web view and a split view badly squeezed on the iPhone’s screen. It feels wrong most of the times.

UberTwitter for iPhone might be huge brand-wise, but it’s not really a great app at all. If you feel like trying something new this morning though, or you simply want to be reminded why you switched from BlackBerry last year, the app is available here. Press release embedded below. Read more

The Coolest Thing You’ll See Today: iPhone Seen Through Oil & Water

We have seen many videos about the iPhone screen in the past: some of them focused on the magic of the Retina Display, some of them aimed at capturing pixels on our old 3GS. The same pixels we didn’t think were so important before we got our hands on the iPhone 4.

Today’s video is about the iPhone’s screen, as seen through a Canon EOS 5D looking down a piece of glass with oil & water on it. Jesse Zanzinger, the photographer who realized the video, set the maximum level of iPhone brightness, placed a piece a glass with oil and water above the iPhone and looked down with his camera to capture both science’s best enemies and the screen in a single shoot.

The result is kind of surprising. Check it out below, but don’t this at home kids. I don’t want oil to end up all over your iPhones. [Vimeo] Read more

Apple-1 Goes For $213k In Christie’s Auction→

Apple-1 Goes For $213k In Christie’s Auction

Two hundred Apple-1 computers are estimated to have been created and sold for $666.66 before Apple Computer Inc. was founded in 1977. Once the Apple II, the company’s first official product, was released, many of the Apple-1 models were reclaimed as trade-ins. Only about 50 are still known to exist, many of them indexed by hardware developer Mike Willegal.

Of those 200 machines, Christie’s Apple-1 is No. 82. This same Apple-1 is thought to be the same one that was sold on eBay in November 2009 by a user named “apple1sale” to “julescw72”. At the time, it sold for a winning bid of $50,000.

Remember the original Apple-1 that was up for auction at Christie’s? Someone bought it for almost $220,000.

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Due 1.2 Alerts You It’s The Best Reminder App for iPhone

Back in September I reviewed Due, an interesting new app to quickly create reminders and set up timers on your iPhone. The first version of the app featured a cool UI and a good set of functionalities, allowing you to easily switch between the reminder and timer window. Most of all, the best thing about Due was that it looked great and enabled you to just forget about the app once reminders were set.

It’s really simple: once you enter a new item you can choose a due date & time, but there are some handy shortcuts in the same screen. If you find yourself constantly using some reminders as countdowns, you can create a timer. That’s it. The interface is clean and polished, and the app doesn’t even need an internet connection to work as it’s based on iOS 4′s local notification system.

The new 1.2 version, which was approved yesterday and I have been beta testing for a while, adds terrific new features to an already great package. If you tap on a reminder in the main screen, for instance, you’ll be presented a bar containing shortcuts to turn snooze on and off, set the reminder as repeating, reschedule the whole thing to 10 minutes, 1 hour or 1 day later. Useful. The developer added reminder management (something many fans hoped they would not, in order to keep the app simple) but by stuffing it in a bar you’ll only see after a tap, they didn’t clutter anything. It feels good.

Due for iPhone is available at $2.99 in the App Store. Check out the huge changelog with all the new features and more screenshots below. Read more

New York Times Uses Hipstamatic Photos For Front Page Story→

New York Times Uses Hipstamatic Photos For Front Page Story

When NYT photog Damon Winter went to northern Afghanistan to catalog the efforts of the First Battalion, 87th Infantry of the 10th Mountain Division, he took all the fancy camera equipment you would expect. He’d shoot video of firefights with a Canon EOS 5D Mark II, sure. But he also grabbed still photos using Hipstamatic, an app that lets you choose among a huge selection of filters.

Front page photo here. Impressive.

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iOS 4.2.1 RAM Usage Visualized

iOS 4.2 is a major new update for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad – built on the strong foundation of iOS 4 – which introduces many new features, fixes and overall performance improvements. If you ever wondered how much iOS 4.2 improved the experience from a memory usage standpoint, take a look at the graph below, compiled by the guys over at iPadevice.

The graph doesn’t come with a provided scale, but it gives you a quick idea of the performance improvements Apple focused on for the release of iOS 4.2 for iPad.

SBSettings Now iOS 4.2.1-Ready | Cydia

Good news keep coming for early iOS 4.2.1 jailbreakers: if you installed Cydia on your newly updated device this morning using redsn0w, you might want to fire up Cydia again and check for updates. SBSettings, the popular utility to access iPhone and iPad functionalities such as respring, reboot and a variety of shortcuts, is now fully compatible with iOS 4.2.1.

The new 3.2.1 update fixes a statusbar free memory issue, the date display on iOS 4.2.1 and permissions on SBSettings data storage folder. It’s available now in Cydia.