Federico Viticci

10882 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.

Cydia Gets an Essential Update - Speed Increases and Error Handling

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It appears last night that Saurik has updated APT, which now has an optimized cache generator and has become more error tolerant in repository parsing. This means less error screens when connecting to repositories that might have an error at that particular moment, which used to end up causing Cydia users a ton of grief, sometimes even crashing them out of Cydia. This update should help correct some of that.





MyPhoneDesktop Puts Your iPhone On Your Desktop. Review and Giveaway.

Sharing information between your desktop computer and the iPhone can be a hell of a task sometimes. Whether you want to share pictures, documents, text, links or just anything, Apple’s products don’t come with an easy built-in solution to achieve a complete, easy and painless sharing. Sure there’s MobileMe, but that’s not so immediate. Dropbox, still requires a sync and I don’t exactly see it a sharing platform - it’s a backup and sync solution. On the other hand, native applications like Pastebot allow you to let your iPhone communicate with your Mac and vice versa by sharing the clipboard over a wireless connection. With Pastebot you can transfer text, links and pictures with just a few clicks and taps and it’s no doubt a great app. Be sure to write our review if you missed it.

MyPhoneDesktop is a rather different application that takes a unique approach in providing its own way to share stuff between your computer, the web and the iPhone. It combines push notifications with bookmarklets and a Mac app to let the devices “talk” with each other. I had the chance to test it for a few days, here are my impressions so far. Also, we have 10 promo codes to give away.

Read more


Fortune: Apple Is “Most Admired” Company of 2010

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“With 250 million iPods, 43 million iPhones, and 32 million iPod touches sold to date, plus the promise of a game-changing iPad, Apple won this year’s vote by the highest margin ever for a No. 1. Two more years as champ and Apple will match GE for most appearances in the top spot.

What makes Apple so admired? Product, product, product. This is the company that changed the way we do everything from buy music to design products to engage with the world around us. Its track record for innovation and fierce consumer loyalty translates into tremendous respect across business’ highest ranks.”

I’d also say: apps, apps, apps.


No More Accidental Caps Lock with CapSee

If you do a lot of writing with your Mac, you might be interested in CapSee. CapSee is a lightweight utility that presents a bezel on screen everytime you activate the caps lock. Just like Mac OS X does with volume or brightness.

It’s free, it works great.

CapSee

CapSee


Firefox 4.0 Alpha 2 Brings out-of-process Plugins

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“Mozilla has released a second developer preview of Firefox 4.0 which contains a piece of the Electrolysis project. Dubbed “Out-of-Process Plugins,” the new feature will ensure that plugins don’t bring down the entire browser. When a plugin, such as Flash, crashes, the user’s session will stay intact, leaving the plugin to be dealt with on it its own. Firefox will terminate the problematic plugin and then restart it automatically.”


Plainview, Full Screen Browser

CultOfMac

“Plainview is a web browser with a difference. It’s a full screen browser, lacking any bells and whistles at all except just the one: no chrome, if you’ll forgive the pun.

So all you get is web content from floor to ceiling. Everything else gets hidden away, including your Dock and your Menu Bar.”