Federico Viticci

10791 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.
@[email protected]
@viticci.macstories.net
viticci@macstories.net

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Photobag, Geo-based Photo Organizer. Review and Giveaway.

They say the best camera is the one that’s always with you. I’m not a photographer, but I don’t mind taking some pics with my iPhone when I can, so I couldn’t agree more with this expression.

Let’s focus on the iPhone: the App Store has thousands of photography app, probably one of the best selling categories. Apps for digital flash, digital zoom, quick editing, Flickr uploading, everything. There are also many apps that integrate geo tagging seamlessly and usefully, thanks to the built-in iPhone capabilities.

Today we’d like to talk about a new app that got accepted by Apple 2 days ago, and that’s very promising. It’s called Photobag, and we have 10 promo codes up for grabs.

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Attic Winners Announced

Thanks everyone who entered the Attic giveaway. Also, we’d like to thank the Tapku developers for the codes they gave to MacStories.

Here are the winners:

Weito

John Espino

Joekw

Mathew Rice

iMaddin

You’ll receive the code in your inbox in a matter of a few hours.

Cheers!

Subler, Great App to Embed Subtitles in Quicktime. Mux MP4 Files. Open Source.

Hosted on Google Code, Subler (by Damiano Galassi) is an open source application for Mac OS X that enables you to mux .mp4 files. For those who don’t know mux (from multiplexing), it’s a device that selects one of many analog or digital input signals and forwards the selected input into a single line. (Wikipedia)

Basically, Mux allows the creation of tx3g subtitle tracks compatible with most every Apple product out there, not to mention full Quicktime compatibility. It’s got tagChimp support, you can play around with the iTunes metadata (you can even add metadata unavailable in other apps, such as the HD tag) and it supports the following formats: .h264, .264, .aac, .ac3 and .scc.

What’s so great about Subler is how easily it lets you edit stuff. Whether you need to add soft subtitles, remove audio tracks and cut chapters Subler is just perfect. Also, with this process you can avoid the conversion time of burning subtitles in the video with Quicktime or Perian: you can just use Subler to mux the .srt file.

Overall, Subler is the best solution to quickly embed subtitles in a Quicktime movie. And I think that’s a great achievement.

Virgin America Rejects Flash. “HTML Is Good Enough”

Link

“Start-up airline Virgin America has decided HTML is “good enough” for animating online content on its brand-new website, which went live Monday, dumping Flash.

Chief information officer (CTO) Ravi Simhambhatla told The Reg: “I don’t want to cater to one hardware or one software platform one way to another, and Flash eliminates iPhone users. This year is going to be the year of the mobile [for Virgin].”

See? It’s that easy.

Less Framework Enables Smart Website Resizing for Mobile Devices. HTML5-powered.

Link

Well, not just for mobile devices:

“Less Framework is a CSS framework for building flexible multi-column website layouts. It contains an eight-column grid optimized for a line-height of 24px, as well as a set of typography presets based on the golden ratio that fit into the grid’s vertical rhythm.

Less Framework layouts work perfectly in Chrome, Safari 3.0+, Firefox 3.0+ and Internet Explorer 7+. They collapse intelligently into a single column in legacy browsers and on small screens.

The best example of Less Framework in use is this very site. Try resizing your browser window or accessing this site with different devices, like your mobile phone.”

Excellent.

Quote Portal Winners Announced

Thanks everyone who entered the Quote Portal giveaway. Also, we’d like to thank the Decluttered Mind developers for the codes they gave to MacStories.

Here are the winners:

Yseult

Pham Duy Nguyen

Ethan G

carlomaru

Eduardo

Teryn

Marcus

Chris

Michael

Rossella

You’ll receive the code in your inbox in a matter of a few hours.

Cheers!

html5media Enables The HTML5 Video Tag In All Major Browsers

Earlier today I posted a tweet regarding this new project I found on Google Code, html5media. With only two lines of code in the <head> of your webpage html5media allows you to use the <video> tag in almost every browser by simply calling two .js files.

From the wiki page:

“The html5media script scans your page for video tags, and checks whether your browser is capable of playing the files they contain using a HTML5 media player. If the browser can play the contents of the video tags, then the script does nothing.

If your browser does not support HTML5 video, then the offending video tags are dynamically replaced with a Flowplayer instance, providing the same functionality as the original video tag.”

This makes me think how ridiculous is the debate on keeping the current Flash alive. There’s something better out there, even for you porn aficionados.

Sneak Peek: Laterstars, the Faved Tweets Manager. 25 Invite Codes Up for Grabs.

Do you know what @Digeratii, @mosspuppet and @jackamick have in common? They share the highest ratio of favorited tweets in my account. I don’t know what’s wrong with those guys, I seriously can’t help but hitting the fave button on their tweets. Follow them on Twitter and you’ll find out why but remember - you heard it here first.

Anyway, it’s not like everyone on Twitter follows @Digeratii (though he once confessed he plans to surpass Ashton’s followers someday) and wants to hear about the adventures of his smart dog Kona; people seem to use the favorite feature as a way to save links for later. And I must admit it, I do it as well sometimes. Rather than emailing the tweet to myself, saving it to Read It Later or just retweet it, I can fave it (because I like it anyway) and open it later. Works good, it’s fast and it gives a little more information about you and the stuff you like.

Now, I think the Laterstars guys have been as smart as Kona in developing their web application. Laterstars is a self-updating container and organizer for the tweets you’ve faved, packed in a sexy and usable UI.

It’s in the closed beta stage, but we got 25 invites for you. Keep on reading.

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