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

WSJ: Indeed, Apple Announcing Beatles & iTunes Tomorrow

This could be the end of the saga. It seems like Beatles’ library coming to iTunes is “official” at this point. The Wall Street Journal reports:

The deal resulted from talks that were taking place as recently as last week among executives of Apple, representatives of the Beatles and their record label, EMI Group Ltd., according to these people, who also warned that there is still a chance that Apple could change plans at the last minute.

Spokesmen for Apple, EMI and Paul McCartney declined to comment.

They couldn’t learn the terms of the deal, but according to their “exclusive” sources it’s a done thing. How the Beatles catalogue available in iTunes is supposed to change our lives can’t be verified either.

Fullscreen.me Is The Simplest Way To Create Full-Screen iOS Web Apps

Fullscreen.me is a neat service I discovered last night which enables you to create iOS web apps that run in full-screen mode with just a few taps. Many popular web services out there come with iPhone and iPad specific interfaces (Gmail, Google Reader, Flickr), but wouldn’t it be great to easily run them in full-screen mode instead of being forced to open them in Mobile Safari every time you launch a webclip?

Fullscreen.me does just that: it turns websites into full-screen web apps. You can choose from a set of built-in services (namely Google products) or manually enter a URL and make your own web app. What’s cool is that Fullscreen.me lets you pick your own icon (stored somewhere on the internet) to override a website’s default apple-icon.png – meaning no more fuzzy Gmail icon on your Springboard. You can also set a custom status bar color or create a “splash URL” to display before the web app fully loads.

You can try out Fullscreen.me by opening it on your iOS devices. Really good stuff.

Billboard: Beatles Coming To iTunes Tomorrow

Following Peter Kafka’s comments at All Things Digital about streaming and cloud services not coming to iTunes tomorrow, Billboard now weighs in consolidating the rumors that Apple is going to announce an exclusive deal to bring the Beatles’ library to the iTunes Store:

That’s not fully confirmed, but after a day of phone calls, e-mails and cryptic messages, Billboard.biz is sticking its neck out and saying this is what we’re going to hear tomorrow.

It wouldn’t be the first time that Apple was “on the verge” of announcing a Beatles deal. For years, every music-related announcement coming from Apple carried a hint of maybe “today’s the day.” But this time it’s very likely that it’ll be the case tomorrow morning.

For these (admittedly thin) reasons and others that we can’t yet divulge here, place your bets on a Beatles announcement tomorrow. Now comes the speculation as to what that announcement will entail.

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“Everyone Has A Scam”→

“Everyone Has A Scam”

Dave Winer on iPhone apps that silently grab your data:

It’s like spammers took over technology, like the pet food guys did in 1999. Everyone has a scam. This year the scam is to grab all the user’s data and resell it. It’s gotten to the point where it’s a risky proposition to try out a new iPhone product.

Perhaps a little bit tragic, but I get his point: how do you gain trust in a sea of 300,000 apps?

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StreamToMe Streams Music and Video From Your Computer To iOS

With all the talk about iTunes’ “exciting announcement” and the possibilities of a cloud-based iTunes streaming and storage solution, I decided to take a step back to cover one of my favorite apps for iPhone and iPad, an app that allows you to stream audio and video from any computer to any iOS device.

The app is called StreamToMe, and unlike the popular Air Video it can stream music just fine, whether it’s organized in your iTunes library or stored somewhere else on your computer. I keep mine in Dropbox and it works just fine. Not to mention video, which works flawlessly with StreamToMe. So let’s see what you have to do to get things up and running. Read more

Is “iTunes Live Stream” The Announcement We’ll Never Forget?

Italian blog The Apple Lounge found something really interesting the property list file of iTunes 10.1: code references of a feature called “iTunes Live Stream”, although it’s not clear what such feature could be aimed at. The Apple Loung and MacRumors speculate it might be something video-related, as Apple recently deployed its own HTTP streaming solution for Apple devices by live streaming the latest Steve Jobs’ keynotes. Read more

Momento 2.0 Collects Your Social Activity In A Single Beautiful Place

Momento is a diary and journal writing app for iPhone I first reviewed back in December 2009 when it came out. Not much happened since then: the developers released a few updates with no new features, Apple released the iPad and the iPhone 4, but a completely new Momento was nowhere to be seen on the new devices. We didn’t get an iOS 4 / iPhone 4 update this summer, we didn’t get the chance to run the app on our tablets.

iPad version aside, everything else is about to change today with Momento 2.0, a free update for previous Momento owners (that like me, might have uninstalled the app as it wasn’t getting an update). Momento 2.0 features an awful lot more feeds you can import your activity from such as Youtube and Foursquare, not to mention the possibility to add any RSS feed and create multiple accounts. For those who missed it: Momento collects all your online activity in one single, beautiful place. And with full Retina Display support and a new landscape view, you can bet it’s beautiful. I’m trying the app right now and it looks great on my iPhone. I liked the UI before; now it just shines.

Momento 2.0 comes with so many new features it’s really hard to cover them all here. If you want, you can take a look at the changelog below and see how much the developers refined, implemented and fixed. For instance, you can now easily backup and restore and export in plain text format.

Momento 2.0 is a free update for existing customers and it’s available at $1.99 in the App Store. Check out the full changelog and screenshots below.

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All Things Digital: Don’t Hold Your Breath For iTunes Cloud Tomorrow

Uh oh, here’s what Peter Kafka from All Things D has to say about Apple’s teaser on its homepage and the big iTunes announcement tomorrow:

I’ll be very surprised if it is music related — like a new music subscription service, or even one that lets you stream music you already own to multiple devices. The music industry sources I’ve talked to so far today don’t know of any new deals between Apple and the big music labels. So that would rule out a new subscription service, which would definitely require a new rights deal.

And that also makes it very unlikely that Apple does the next best thing: Letting users upload their iTunes catalog to the cloud, and letting them access it anywhere they want.

It’s getting trickier. Speculation continues.

How To Change Your iPhone’s Default Browser

Last week I installed a new universal browser for iPhone and iPad called “iCab” which I’m going to review soon here on MacStories. The browser is so good I wondered if there was a way to force iOS to open links from any app using iCab instead of Safari. I know it’s not a recommended move and it might turn out to be pretty problematic in the future, plus I actually had tried to override Safari a few times in the past.

I didn’t know a tweak to change the iPhone’s default browser had been released in Cydia until I stumbled upon iCab’s excellent feature and decided to google that again. Browser Changer, available for free in Cydia, does just that: it replaces Mobile Safari as your iPhone default browser. Read more