Federico Viticci

10962 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

AppSaurus: A “Genius” App Store.

It’s not a secret that finding the right applications for you in the crowded App Store is sometimes very, very hard. Maybe it’s because of the inner structure of the App Store (top grossing apps are more likely to show up in the charts), maybe it’s because of Apple’s policy and sometimes it’s due to a lack of marketing creativity from the developers themselves but the fact is - a small percentage of users really find what they’re exactly looking for. And so came Apple related blogs like MacStories to do the job of talking about less known apps worth a look. Now, even if a blog like MacStories  mentions 10 new apps a week, it’s still impossible to actually mention every single app that gets published or updated. The App Store is huge, there are thousands of developers and the App Store should be updated to a more organized structure. This is the real problem at the end of the day.

So what? Could there be a better way to discover applications you’d like to have? Like, recommendations? Sure there is. Let me talk about AppSaurus.

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MenuBrain: Simple Text Snippets in the Menubar

How many times have you wished to have a collection of text snippets a mouse click away? Yeah, my entire workflow is somewhat based on recurring snippets I usually insert into mails, posts and other invoicing stuff. I’m currently using ClipMenu (the great, free clipboard utility you must go download now) to do the whole job of keeping snippets organized into folders, but for those who don’t like Clipmenu or just want an even simpler application, I’ve just discovered MenuBrain form The IconMaster which might be perfect for you.

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Keep Track of Your iPhone’s Life with Statistique. Review and Giveaway!

If you use your iPhone as much as I do, it’s very likely that you like to keep track of everything it can do. You have badges enabled for every application, you jailbroke it to install additional tools like statusbar tweaks, you read guides about how to get the most out of it.

Now, there are many apps in the App Store that enable you to track various stats of the iPhone, but today I’d like to talk about an application I discovered last week and I’ve been using for a few days now: Statistique.

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Dear Apple: What We Want to See for iPhone 4.0

First part of what’s gonna be a great series from TUAW, based on the suggestions people made about OS 4.0.

The most requested features are:

  • New Lockscreen, with “a brief overview of all the new data we’ve received” instead of notification boxes;

  • New Homescreen, with location-aware capabilities and Exposè

  • Universal Documents folder

  • Disk mode

I’m totally up for them. But there’s one thing missing, I’d love to have better iTunes integration. iTunes should become an application to completely manage your iPhone on your desktop, not just a sync tool. Again, I want iTunes 10.

Showcase Your iPhone First Page: #sharethe1st

I am always curious about how people effectively manage their Macs or iPhones. As a matter of fact, I’m always looking for suggestions, idea..inspiration. To satisfy my curiosity, I made a quick poll on Twitter yesterday and I asked my followers to send me their first page of their iPhone springboard, including the #sharethe1st hashtag.

I received a lot of mentions including pictures of your iPhones, both jailbroken and not, showcasing some cool configurations and apps I didn’t even know.

So I decided to put something together and here’s a post which collects the pictures you sent me, with a link to the author’s profile and website. I’d like this to become something usual with you guys so feel free to @reply me on Twitter with a screenshot of your 1st Springboard page. Please also include the #sharethe1st hashtag.

Enjoy!

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Favorite Tweets of the Week Jan 4th - Jan 10th

I usually tweet a lot of stuff: apps tutorials, news, videos, reviews, hacks and so much more. Everything that’s Apple-related and it’s interesting, it’s worth a tweet.

To keep up to date with all these links you can follow me on Twitter, but in case you missed here’s a small compilation of the best tweets of the past week.

You can find me on Twitter as @storiesofmac.

Enjoy!

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Stage: Social Sharing and Music Player App. Review and Giveaway!

Yesterday I reviewed PodTweet, a cool and nice application by Cardboard Software which lets you tweet the song you’re listening to on your iPod Touch or iPhone. It has one and only feature, but it surely gets the job done. Could this process of sharing music on Twitter be better developed? It surely can.

Meet Stage, a recently released iPhone app which combines this social networking music thing with a stunning and delicious user interface.

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The Tablet. Finely Tuned.

There’s a lot of buzz going on about the tablet Apple should announce in a matter of a few days. You know, every blog that I know has posted at least an article about it, so I decided to share my thoughts as well.

I believe that the tablet will be announced, and that it won’t be called Apple Tablet, iSlate, Macbook Touch, iPhone XL or whatever fake name you can think of. Now, this is not a post where I discuss specs, nor I will share my thoughts about prices, controlled leaks and other people’s opinion.

I want to focus on apps, and how I believe Apple is going to collaborate with 3rd party developers. Just like if it’s day one again.

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