Federico Viticci

10789 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

New Apple Patent Shows Smart Drag & Drop for Upcoming OS X

Beingmanan.com has spotted a new patent filled by Apple, which focuses on the interaction between the user and the file system via drag & drop.

According to this patent Apple is working on a “smart drag & drop” solution, which should enable us to sort documents into folders basing on the file types, rather than manually organize them. Pretty much like those folders actions that already let you automatically move a file into a specific folder, but built in in the OS.

To me, it sounds great. I expect this exact kind of things from 10.7, revamped and brand new user interactions.

Explicit Apps Are Back in the App Store - Almost [UPDATED]

Remember when Apple removed all the “explicit content apps” from the App Store? Well, Apple is getting ready to put them back in. By visiting these two URLs (here and here) seems like the categories are ready, are there’s one for the iPad as well.

The categories are currently empty, and I suppose it’s because they’re not actually ready yet. I think it’s just another technical error by some engineer at Apple.

Here are the screenshots.

Again, who’s gonna be fired for this?

[UPDATE]

The links are no longer working. Apple fixed the error, but in my opinion we’ll see the explicit apps coming back very soon.

Nambu 2.0 Beta Goes Public. Reviewed.

Loren Brichter is working on Tweetie 2 for Mac, but it’s not that every developer out there is sitting at his desk waiting for the Atebits guy to ship his newest creation. Absolutely not, as almost a new Twitter client is released every day (yeah, according to Wikipedia) and guess what - a good 95% is pure shit. But fortunately, every once in a while a good client comes along and tries to persuade Mac users to stop using Tweetie 1.x, and approach a new experience.

Nambu for Mac has been around for a while now, but some weeks ago I heard that there was a 2.0 version floating around, and it was a closed beta. I got accepted into the private testing group and had the chance to try the app. Today Nambu has decided to open the gates of the beta version, which is now available for download for everyone.

Here are my impressions so far.

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Propane Brings Campfire to Your Mac Desktop

As you may have read, we’ve started using Basecamp and Backpack from 37signals as our productivity tools of choice to manage the projects inside MacStories. We’ve also paired them with some 3rd party tools suck as Spootnik and Headquarters to further enhance our workflow, and we’re very happy with them - we think we’ve found the best way to keep us organized and access our tasks from anywhere, be it the desktop, web or iPhone.

The other 37signals product, Campfire, was too much tempting to not give it a try, and so I decided to create an account and see whether  it could come in handy. Sure it did, but combined with a Mac app called Propane.

Read on to find out why.

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George Hotz Strikes Back: Announces New iPhone Jailbreak, iPad Plans

George Hotz, the genius behind the popular jailbreak tool blackra1n, is back.

With a brief post on his personal blog he’s announced (and documented with video) that he’s working on a new version of the jailbreak, which will be untethered (means the device doesn’t need assistance from a computer to boot) and will work on all the current tethered-only models (iPhone 3GS, iPod Touch 2G & 3G). And with a final note he says “it will probably work on iPad too”.

Seems like we won’t be waiting that long for multitasking on the iPad after all.

Apple Rejects Snowtape for iPhone, But Doesn’t Provide Any Specific Reason

Alright folks, this is weird. Vemedio, the developers of Snowtape for Mac, have been working for the past few months on an iPhone version of their application, which I’ve got the pleasure to beta test. The application is stunning and impressive both in looks and functionalaties, but that’s not the point.

From what we can read on a post on Vemedio’s official blog, Apple has rejected Snowtape for iPhone due to its built in feature of recording internet radio and storing the files on the iPhone.

From the post:

“I got a call from Steve Rea of iPhone Developer Relations telling me that they can not approve Snowtape for iPhone. Effectively he said that Apple can not publish an app that records audio from an internet stream and store it permanently on the iPhone and of cause he explictly said that we can not have a function in our app for re-distribution of these recordings. What he meant is that Apple can not allow you folks to record internet radio and store it as MP3 on your local storage. Of course I tried to asked him about the paragraph in the iPhone Developer SDK agreement, we are violating. His sole words were, that there are lots of things missing in the SDK agreement and that they can not foresee any circumstance that leads to a denial of an app. That‘s right! We did not violate any paragraph of the SDK, yet they forbid us distributing our app.”

Vemedio didn’t violate any paragraph, but the app has been rejected because there are “a lot of things missing from the SDK” and they just can’t approve it. Too bad for Steve Rea that Martin Hering (the developer) went looking for other internet radio apps in the App Store and found at least 3 apps that have the same feature, but they’re online and available.

Unbelievable? A huge fail, I say. Come on Apple, go approve Snowtape - the app is great.