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

Using A Macbook From An iPad With iTeleport

Since I saw the first real photos of the iPad and its gorgeous screen, I wondered how many developers would start developing VNC clients for it. I mean, back then it was pretty clear that the iPad’s screen was perfect to access your computer remotely, and it’s more than clear now that we’ve tested a bunch of applications to do so.

I’ve downloaded and tested many VNC clients for the iPhone and the iPad, and I think that many of them show good ideas and possibilities, but most of them fail in the most important aspect: providing a stress free and easy way to just show your computer’s screen on a mobile device, and interact with it. They overwhelm the user with tons of useless features but, fortunately, iTeleport is nothing like that.

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Communal Computing

Craig Hockenberry over at his personal blog:

“My iPad has a lot of personal information on it: email, business documents, and financial data. When you pass it around, you’re giving everyone who touches it the opportunity to mess with your private life, whether intentionally or not. That makes me uneasy.

[…]

I can envision several ways to solve this problem: either with a traditional login screen or with something new like folders that require a passcode to open. I have no doubt that your designers can find something elegant that gives me peace of mind as I share my iPad with friends and family.”


Steve Jobs Posts His Thoughts On Flash

The man has spoken. Steve Jobs himself has in fact posted his thoughts about the Flash platform in a pretty long “open letter to the community”, available here.

The post is interesting and worth checking out in its entirety, but just to sum up Steve’s thoughts:

“Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.”

Steve’s main concern is that Flash is a closed platform, with crappy performances on mobile devices and that can seriously cut the battery life of Apple’s devices. Overall, it seems like the whole letter is focused on mobile devices rather than desktop computers:

“New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.”

and

“Flash is a cross platform development tool. It is not Adobe’s goal to help developers write the best iPhone, iPod and iPad apps. It is their goal to help developers write cross platform apps.”

Now the situation gets very interesting. We’ll wait for a response from Adobe now.

iPad “Spirit” Jailbreak Coming Tomorrow?

There’s been a lot of buzz around this new jailbreak tool called “Spirit”, which should be able to jailbreak every device on the market: iPhone 2G, 3G and 3GS, iPad WiFi and 3G, iPod Touch 1G, 2G and 3G. It should be an all in one solution for all those who want to install Cydia and enjoy the apps and utilities banned from Apple.

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