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.

Radar Winners Announced

Thanks everyone who entered the Radar giveaway. Also, we’d like to thank the Madewithbits developers for the licenses they gave to MacStories.

Here are the winners:

x0r

David

oykun.yilmaz

Thibaut Ninove

ralph

Davide85

Michael

Martin Král

Dennis

Knox

You’ll receive the licenses in your inbox in a matter of a few days. Stay tuned for other giveaways coming this week.

In the meantime, you can follow the official MacStories Twitter account as @macstoriesnet.


SpringBoard Rotator Brings Landscape Mode To The iPhone Home Screen

If you ever wished to use your iPhone in landscape mode even when playing around with the home screen, soon you’ll be able to do it. iPhoneHellas has just published an exclusive preview of SpringBoard Rotator, a soon to be released in Cydia tool that will allow you to rotate your iPhone and enjoy a landscape-enabled springboard.

As you can see it doesn’t stop at rotating icons or other similar tricks, a landscape statusbar and wallpaper are injected into the iPhone, icons are stretched and same happens to the dock. Sure it needs more stability and more space between the icons (I’m not a huge fan of pages cluttered with 30+ icons) but it’s really promising. Check out the embedded video below.


Macbuzzer Launches, Get a Free License of Rucksack

Remember Rucksack, the archive manager app we talked about some weeks ago? Thanks to this new kid on the block of Mac bundles (yeah, another one), Macbuzzer,  you can get a free license of Rucksack by simply tweeting a message, much like you had to do with MacHeist.

Included in the bundle are Sponge, MainMenu and Thoughts app, and each of them has some discount applied.


Matt Gemmell On Selling Source Code

Link

“For whatever reason, there are only a handful of people selling code components on the Apple platforms. I suspect that’s less about the market and much more about perceived worthiness; we do all tend to collectively reinforce the perception that only the very best stuff will do, and it’s incredibly difficult to convince yourself your code is even worthy of being open source, much less paid for in its raw form. I’ve had to twist the arms of so many Mac developers to convince them that they have a component worth sharing with others.”


Win a Copy of Radar for Basecamp

Radar, which we mentioned in our Basecamp and Backpack post here, is a small and simple utility which displays Growl notifications for every new item in your Basecamp account.

We have 10 licenses up for grabs, all you have to do is leave a comment here. No tweeting required!

Winners will be announced on Monday, March 15th.

Good luck!


Quiet Read Pro Winners Announced

Thanks everyone who entered the Quiet Read Pro giveaway. Also, we’d like to thank the Bambooapps developers for the licenses they gave to MacStories.

Here are the winners:

Ricardo

Giovanni Lanzani

thetechmonkey

Dennis Houston

Veronica Andersson

You’ll receive the licenses in your inbox in a matter of a few days. Stay tuned for other giveaways coming this week.

In the meantime, you can follow the official MacStories Twitter account as @macstoriesnet .


Opera: “We’re Very Much Following Apple’s Rules”

CNN reports that Opera’s spokesman Thomas Ford demonstrated Opera for iPhone at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival, confirming that the app has reached a pretty much stable beta stage, claiming a six times faster browsing speed than Safari. The submission to the App Store is now “weeks away”, and Opera is almost ready to show their newest mobile browser in public.

Also, from the same post:

“I wouldn’t say we’re trying to back Apple into a corner,” Ford said. “We feel that we’re very much following their rules.”

If you ask me, I think the app will be approved - especially after all the Apple / Google thing. But on the opposite, are we sure that sending all the traffic through Opera’s server is an acceptable compromise to have a faster experience?


Basecamp and Backpack, Quintessential Business Tools – As Seen from Web, Mac and iPhone.

As soon as I started searching for contributors who wanted to write for MacStories, I also started looking for a good application to manage that kind of team. A team that doesn’t deal with designs or clients, but with tons of text, screenshots, milestones and news. I guess managing a blog’s team is one of the most complicated things to do on the web (especially if you work in different countries) because from what I can tell so far, there’s no dedicated software to for bloggers. Not a great one at least. For this reason, and because I read a lot of posts about the subject,I subject, I decided to try the applications from 37signals, Basecamp and Backpack. I heard that there were some very good clients too (both for Mac and iPhone), which is really important to me.

In this article we’ll take a look at Basecamp and Backpack, the third party apps Cody and I are using to interact with them, and some additional tools we discovered. We believe you’re gonna start using the 37signals products too.

Read more


Apple Loses Bid to Control Use of ‘i’ in Product Names

Macnn

An Australian trademark tribunal has rejected Apple’s attempt to prevent some companies from using a lowercase “i” in their names, according to the Sydney Morning Herald. At the center of the case is DOPi, a brand of bags and cases for Apple products sold by the Sydney-based Wholesale Central.

Apple complained to IP Australia, the government body behind the tribunal, that people could potentially confuse DOPi products for its own, as the name is a reversed take on “iPod.”

Good news is, now you can name your company “DAPi”.