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.
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@viticci.macstories.net
viticci@macstories.net

iPhone in Japan: 72% of Smartphone Market

Good news for Apple: Businessweek reports that the shipments of the iPhone to Japan have more than doubled in the past year, taking 72% of the smartphone market.

“Shipments of the iPhone, which began selling in Japan in July 2008, climbed to 1.69 million units in the year ended March 31, Tokyo-based MM Research Institute Ltd. said in a report yesterday. That raised the total to 2.3 million, Hideaki Yokota, an analyst at the research firm, said by telephone today.

The iPhone helped smartphone sales more than double last fiscal year in Japan as shipments of regular mobile phones shrank, according to the report. Smartphone shipments will probably exceed 3 million units in the 12 months started April 1, even as the overall market is forecast to contract for a third year, it said.”

I’d be curious to see some stats for Italy though. Very good numbers, anyway.

Newsprint Goes 1.1, 10 Copies Up for Grabs

Remember Newsprint? It’s the RSS application for iPhone we reviewed a while ago here, and I was quite impressed by that first release of the app. The interface surely looked different but good, there were some interesting features to be explored for future releases and, overall, I just liked it.

Finally, Hashbang Ind. has released an update to Newsprint, the 1.1 version, which brings a lot of stability improvements and fixes requested by the users.

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99 Year Old Lady Buys Her First Computer, An iPad

We know that if there’s something great about the multitouch technology it’s accessibility. It’s intuitive, easy to understand, everyone can use it.

Virginia Campbell is a 99 year old lady who’s just bought her first computer to read and write, two things she’s always loved to do. Thing is, the computer is an iPad and it’s incredible to see how she uses it without problems and limitations of any sort. Like we said many times, it just works.

The video we’re embedding after the break is going viral on the Internet, and the story even got picked by Fox12 Oregon. Also, she prefers landscape mode and uses Pages to write her poetry. Well done, Apple.

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InCode, Plain Text Editor for iPad

We at MacStories are always looking forward to new and good apps, but when it comes to apps such as text editors and Twitter clients we’re definitely looking forward and living on the edge. We do this because we firmly believe that one can always do better than someone else, and sometimes it’s just about discovering that good app that’s out in the App Store but no one has ever written about. Sometimes it’s just about trusting that small team of developers that have a great idea. Most of the times though, I guess it’s just about trying new software and be open to new stuff.

That’s why we are always looking forward to the next good app. Without forgetting about the current ones, of course. Once you’re in the loop, it just happens.

The app I’m going to talk about today is a text editor, a quite simple one, that I’ve discovered while browsing the App Store the day it opened. InCode by Novastorm Software looked promising back then, what about now?

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Penultimate, Sketch Your Ideas

The iPad App Store is already overcrowded with hundreds of apps that let you sketch and draw quick visual notes with your fingers. We should have seen this coming, considering the bigger screen and the fact the average App Store user loves this kind of stuff. So, we have all these apps that should enable us to sketch, but it’s safe to say that most of them are pure crap.

Penultimate is not. It’s a great app, a first release that already sports a beautiful interface and features that make this simple utility fun and, in the very end, useful.

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Found Footage: The iPad in Concert

When people start posting product videos like this, one can safely say that that product is a success. Fake (probably) or not (unlikely), Chinese pianist Lang Lang had some serious fun in walking onstage at San Francisco playing Flight Of The Bumblebee on an iPad.

Sounds crazy? Take a look after the break.

[via 9to5Mac]

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