Federico Viticci

10788 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.
@[email protected]
@viticci.macstories.net
viticci@macstories.net

Video: Jailbroken iPad Running Pandora in the Background

After all the requests on Twitter, I decided to record a video showing my iPad running Cydia and Backgrounder.

As you can see, the iPad works just fine, it’s fast as usual and you can spot Backgrounder by the badges on the apps running in the backgrounder. I’ve used Pandora, Newsrack, Cydia and GoodReader to demonstrate it. Like I’ve written earlier this morning, you can’t install ProSwitcher or Kirikae by now as they’re not working yet. If you have suggestions or want to report bugs, feel free to do it in the comments below.

Read more

FTC Looking into Apple’s Section 3.3.1?

The New York Time reports that the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission are “locked in negotiations over which of the watchdogs will begin an antitrust inquiry into Apple’s new policy of requiring software developers who devise applications for devices such as the iPhone and iPad to use only Apple’s programming tools.”

Section 3.3.1 of Apple’s SDK for App Store app is the one that banned third party development tools, thus excluding tools like Flash Catalytist from being used by devs to create their applications.

Also:

“An inquiry doesn’t necessarily mean action will be taken against Apple, which argues the rule is in place to ensure the quality of the apps it sells to customers. Typically, regulators initiate inquiries to determine whether a full-fledged investigation ought to be launched. If the inquiry escalates to an investigation, the agency handling the matter would issue Apple a subpoena seeking information about the policy.”

We’ll keep you posted about it, but I have the feeling that Apple has the right to do what it wants with the App Store, and that the FTC can’t do anything about it.

[via 9to5mac]

How To: Run iPhone Apps on the iPad Without Pixel Doubling [UPDATING]

If you’ve just jailbroken your iPad I guess you’ve already installed OpenSSH from Cydia, which is that framework that allows you to root into your device using FTP clients like Cyberduck and Transmit.

If so, there’s a little trick you can perform that lets you scale iPhone apps for the iPad, without waiting for the developers to update their apps. In this way, and if you’re lucky, you can have an iPhone app running in fullscreen without pixel doubling, which supports all the various orientations and that even uses iPad’s UI elements.

Read more

Apple Confirms: One Million iPads in 28 Days

This is not surprising at all, but it’s nice to have an official confirmation. With a brief press release, which we’re embedding after the break, Apple has confirmed that they’ve sold 1M iPads in just 28 days, while it took 74 days to have the same result with the iPhone.

Great job.

Read more

Jailbreak the iPad With Spirit for Mac And Install Your First Cydia Apps - Compatibility List

So, big news tonight folks: Spirit, the universal jailbreak tool we’ve all been waiting for, it’s out. You can go check it out here. I’ve just managed to jailbreak my iPad (my iPhone is already jailbroken and stuck at 3.1.2) and the process has been very fast and easy. Check the tutorial after the break, together with our impressions about the first apps we’ve installed from Cydia.

Read more

World of Warcraft, Streamed To The iPad

Gaikai is a revolutionary online gaming service, lead by the well known game developer and personality David Perry (@dperry), that will allow you to play games inside your web browser using server side streaming technologies for games. The service is currently accepting signups for a private beta invitations, just go here and enter your details.

Well, David has just posted a picture of what it seems World of Warcraft streamed to the iPad. The interesting fact is that Gaikai for desktop computers should work with Flash Player, but obviously this won’t happen with the iPad so maybe we should expect a specific version for Apple’s device. We can’t wait to find out more.

Check out the photo after the break. [via]

Read more

Find Your Car with Sally Park

I tend to park in the same parking lots every time I go out. Maybe because my town is relatively small, or just because I’m that type of guy that enjoys getting used to things, I’ve gotten used to park my car in the same lots.

But when I go out of my town with my friends, it might happen that when it’s time to come back we spend a few minutes trying to remember where we left the car, and sometimes we also get lost in the attempt to find it. And when these situations occur, we have to thank Doseido for releasing Sally Park in the App Store.

Read more

Jailbroken iPad 3G Sending SMS [Video]

The iPad is jailbroken (at least for the Dev Team guys) and this means that a lot of new stuff will be possible. We saw multitasking, we saw Cydia, now it’s time for text messages. Musclenerd, the popular member of the Dev Team, has just managed to use his jailbroken iPad 3G to send texts using a command line tool, but there no GUI for it (yet?).

Check out the image and video after the break, and you can bet that this is coming to Cydia someday. Next, phone calls?

Read more

Binary Nights Releases Forklift 2.0 [Beta]

What a week for file transfer apps for Mac OS X. Panic has released the long awaited Transmit 4 this week (be sure to read our review here if you missed it) and now Binary Night has finally put the first official public beta of Forklift 2 online, you can go download it here.

Forklift 2 features a completely rewritten and 64-bit compatible engine, which according to the developers should make this new version 3x - 33x faster than any other app on the market. We’ll let you know about that after our tests during this weekend. Also, the 2.0 update brings new features like Workspaces and Synclets, Stacks, Unarchiver framework and many other stuff. Stay tuned for a complete review next week.

In the meantime, go download the beta and check out two screenshots after the break.

Read more