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.
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@viticci.macstories.net
viticci@macstories.net

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Audiobox, Your Web Cloud Player.

I don’t want to repeat myself, but I can’t help mentioning everything is moving to the cloud, including our music. With Bitspace out of the closed beta and Apple building a massive data center in North Carolina, it seems like we’ll be choosing between 3rd party cloud music apps and iTunes Air in a matter of a few years. But as we’re waiting for Apple’s ultimate solution to be announced, we can already test cloud powered music players - Bitspace is a great example.

Today I’ll talk about a new webapp I discovered some weeks ago, it’s called Audiobox and it’s already been featured by sites like Lifehacker. The development team is entirely Italian, the guys are based in Milan and I had the chance to talk with them about the creation of the app - which is really promising and somehow different from what Bitspace offers.

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Why Skitch Has Captured My Heart

Skitch is awesome. I love it, and if it were a girl, I would want to take it out to dinner, impress it with fine wine choice and witty banter, and then encourage it to love me forever, and have my babies. I think if you get to know it, you’ll love it too, although maybe more platonically.

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Liquid Scale: Smart Image Resizing. Review and Giveaway.

Since I upgraded my Flickr account to Pro, I started using my iPhone as my main camera. I’ve got no background in photography, but still I like to take pictures when I stumble upon a gorgeous landscape or a beautiful girl. What better device than an iPhone for someone who doesn’t have a professional camera and still wants to upload stuff on Flickr?

So I purchased some photography apps in the App Store, like the amazing Tiltshift Generator (the app I use most), Hipstamatic and Camera Genius. They provide an easy way for an ignorant like me to get pretty decent shots, whenever I like. They’ve got basic post processing capabilities as well, so I don’t have to mess with exposure sliders and other advanced stuff I can barely spell at all.

But you know, it could happen that you have this pic shot with your iPhone, which is almost perfect except for that little detail in the background that ruins it. Let’s say it’s a car. Now what, you want to export the photo to your Mac, fire up Photoshop and edit it? Sure you can, but you have to be able to use Photoshop or other image editing tools - which I’m not.

Luckily, I’ve discovered this neat and promising app called Liquid Scale: it allows me to “magically scale” pictures, deleting details I don’t want, still without comprimising the main content. Sounds crazy? It is.

And we even got 10 copies to give away.

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Hide the Dock and Statusbar On Your iPhone with SBSimplify

Do you remember Gi-lo, the iPhone developer we interviewed a while ago here? He’s part of the Eyedevs team, and the guys have finally started releasing their tweaks and apps on Cydia.

SBSimplify is a simple tweak for your iPhone / iPod Touch that allows you to hide the statusbar and the dock from your springboard. Simple as that, you just have to assign an activation method in the Activator settings (mine is “short hold” on homescreen), execute it and watch to springboard magically stretch to fit the whole screen.

SBSimplify

SBSimplify

SBSimplify

SBSimplify

The only problem is that the app is still uncompatible with Iconoclasm (our post) but Gilo told me that they’re already working on it, together with extended settings for customizing the behaviour of the tweak.

You can head over Eyedevs website here, follow them on Twitter or just search fro SBSimplify on Cydia.

Sneak Peek of Mimeo, Old School Style Platform Game for iPhone by Shaun Inman

Shaun Inman, the genius behind Mint and Fever (and Horror Vacui too), has just published a new blog post to announce Mimeo and the Kleptopus King, his new game for iPhone and iPod Touch. Judging from the video (which I’m embedding below) and the introductory post, Mimeo already looks amazing.

The game will be a platform, clearly inspired by Super Mario Bros. & Co, but it will “re-invent” the whole formula by enabling the user to collect cartridges  ”upgrade” the entire levels from 2-bit to 16-bit graphics.

From the post:

“Mimeo started as a Mario clone with a twist. Instead of power-ups affecting the player, they affect the entire game world. A story and mythos quickly developed. The so-called Mimeoverse consists of two 16-bit demiverses sharing 32-bits between them. When the evil Kleptopus King, an 8-bit Octopus with an inferiority complex, discovers a portal into Mimeo’s realm and begins to syphon off its bits, Mimeo is sucked in and downsampled to 2-bit. So begins Mimeo’s quest to restore balance to the demiverses.

Mimeo collects carts to upscale himself and the game world and enables switching between acquired resolutions to solve platforming puzzles. He will find guidence from nearest-neighbor and native rabbit Gaido. Collected bits translate into 1ups. Disposing of certain types of enemies leaves behind hoodies that grant Mimeo special abilities.”

Sounds cool. Shaun is aiming fir a 2010 holiday season release, so we’ll have to wait to put our hands on this pixel magnificence.

VanillaSurf, The Best Alternative to Safari for iPhone

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past week, you should have read that Opera, the popular Norwegian browser, is coming to the iPhone. While many people - including me - thought that it was just crazy to port Opera to iPhone OS at first, it turned out that the browser has been completely rewritten from the ground up to follow Apple’s rules and it should be released soon in the App Store.

Especially for browsers, Apple has a very strict policy in the App Store: they must be based on MobileSafari, they can’t use their own engine or anything else, they just can apply some graphical modifications, use fullscreen mode and some other features. This means the App Store saw the rise of hundreds of alternatives to Safari, some good and some real shit, that started implementing custom buttons, different use of tabs, fullscreen and more options for bookmarks.

VanillaSurf from bitStorm Software is a recently released alternative browser for iPhone which has replaced Safari for me. Can it work for you as well? Find out below.

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