Federico Viticci

10961 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

4,870 iPad Apps In The App Store

Distimo reports that there 4,870 iPad apps available in the App Store: 1,433 are Universal applications and 3,437 are iPad-only apps. The report also shows the good growth these apps went under the past weeks, and there are also other interesting stats about price points and categories. You can download the report for free here.

Too bad most of these apps are still crap, and the great ones are still to be released. (with a very few exceptions, of course)

[via]

Textie, Free Texting from Atebits

Since when Twitter announced the acquisition of Twitter for iPhone and Mac, we all started wondering where the hell was Loren Brichter. Did the Twitter folks kidnap him and put him in front of an iMac telling him “Do code”? Who knows, but it’s been a nice surprise to find out that Atebits (Loren’s company) and Borange have released a new application for iPhone and iPod Touch called Textie, which allows you to send free text messages to anyone in the world running the same app.

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Lala Is Shutting Down, Apple Gets Ready for iTunes.com

Originally discovered by Techcrunch last night, Lala is shutting down on May 31: subscriptions are closed, and current users will be refunded with iTunes Store credit.

Well, knew that this was gonna happen - but it’s interesting to see it happening one week before the start of the WWDC: every sign is pointing to Apple warming up iTunes.com (which is still being redirected) as their online music streaming service, set to become the most important competitor for services like Spotify, Groovershark and Pandora.

Anyway, we think  that there will be so much more about iTunes.com rather than just music streaming. Hopefully we’ll know more at the WWDC.

Microsoft Confirms Support for HTML5, But Adobe Is Moving Forward

Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of the Internet Explorer project at Microsoft, confirmed (again) their support for open web standards and HTML5 as the technology of the future.

In a blog post:

“The future of the web is HTML5. Microsoft is deeply engaged in the HTML5 process with the W3C. HTML5 will be very important in advancing rich, interactive web applications and site design. The HTML5 specification describes video support without specifying a particular video format. We think H.264 is an excellent format. In its HTML5 support, IE9 will support playback of H.264 video only.”

Pretty self explanatory, and it’s good to see Microsoft trying to do things good for IE9.

On the other hand, it’s Adobe that’s moving forward. They don’t seem to have a proper answer to Steve Jobs’ letter, for this reason they’ve stated (one again) that Apple is blocking their “widely used runtimes”, and so they’re moving forward - to other platforms.

Adobe cares about quantity (number of people who use Flash) more than quality (of Flash).

I think this is standing still, rather than moving forward.