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 OS 4.0: Predictions and Assorted Thoughts

So, Apple will hold a media event on April 8th to give us a sneak peek into the future of iPhone OS 4.0. As you can guess, the 4.0 update will be one of the most important updates the iPhone will go through this year, as it will mark the path Apple is following regarding its mobile phone, most of all when compared to the recently releases iPad.

Will it be nothing more than a performance update issued for a new device to be released in June? Or will it bring brand new features to make the iPhone a complete different device from the iPad?

I say both, with some exceptions.

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Dan Frakes on Mail.app for iPad

Link

“While it has its limitations, especially for power users, it gets most of the basics right, and it excels at the most important tasks: viewing and composing messages, displaying attachments, and connecting reliably to nearly any e-mail server.”

Very good list of missing features as well. I can see most of them coming in a few updates.

New MacBooks Scheduled to Launch This Month

MacRumors reports that a user in their forums translated a news appeared in Taiwanese newspaper Apple Daily, pointing out that new MacBook, MacBook Pro and MacBook Air models should be on their way to launch this month.

As MacRumors further reports:

“…new models were planned for introduction in March but shortages of Intel’s new chips pushed the launch back to this month. The report also claims that Apple will be pushing all three sizes of the MacBook to a maximum of 640 GB hard drives with 8-hour battery performance across the board.”

I wouldn’t be susprised to see the introduction of SSD based MacBooks at all, though. We’ll see.

The Finder Is Dead, And So Are Geeks

I remember when I was a kid I asked my parents to buy me a computer. I didn’t ask for a Mac or a Pc, I just wanted “a computer”. Maybe I should have been more specific in my request, because my parents did buy me a computer, but one of those fake ones kids use to play around with english words and learn basic word processing. Just like this one. Thing is, I wanted a computer, but I had to get along with that. Assuming that we’re calling my first computer an actual computer, I reckon that thing had some sort of desktop with icons to switch back and forth between “programs” and choose which would have been the next step. Should I open the word processor or the dictionary? That’s what was bothering me back then. But even though that was nothing more than a toy, that computer initiated me to the concepts of desktops and apps, the basics or modern computing life.

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Need a Download Manager? You Need Leech 2.

A few days ago I was reading a post on Alexander Limi’s blog called “Improving download behaviors in web browsers”, and from that deep and informative analysis I realized how much Safari’s download management is indeed flawed and could be seriously improved. Now that I think about it, I download a lot of stuff everyday (be it the screenshots Cody sends for our posts, or archives with new icons I want to try out) and I regularly have to a) hide the download window because I can’t stand it and gets in my way and b) clear my download list who easily gets cluttered with all the files I’ve previously downloaded.

As Limi also pointed out in his post, managing downloads in a browser could be a lot better. It should be a lot better, and hopefully we’ll see some new features implemented in the next iterations of Safari and Firefox. But at the moment of writing this, the only solution seems to install a dedicated download manager app, and that’s why today I’m taking a look at Leech by Many Tricks, which has just been updated to the 2.0 version.

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After 24 Hours, the iPad Is Already Jailbroken

I thought I wouldn’t have said this until a few months from now, but it happened: the iPad is already jailbroken. It seems like MuscleNerd and other Dev-Team guys (the same guys who created the jailbreak tools for iPhone and iPod Touch) have managed to run a modified version of the Spirit jailbreak on the iPad, using root access. This means that, I’m telling you, we’ll be able to have a jailbroken iPad in a matter of a few weeks.+

Who said the iPad didn’t support “true” multitasking? Check out the video after the break.

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