Federico Viticci

10861 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

The New MacBook Pro Is Kind of Great for Hackers→

Adam Geitgey:

A million hot takes have been posted about how the late-2016 MacBook Pro with USB-C is the undeniable proof that Apple doesn’t care about developers anymore. They took away all the ports! No Esc key! It’s just a more expensive MacBook Air!

But in some ways, the new MacBook Pro is the most techy and expandable laptop Apple has ever made. They are trusting their pro users to wade into murky USB-C waters in search of the holy grail of a universal, open standard for moving data and power between devices.

I’m not here to change your mind about the MacBook Pro. Yes, it’s probably too expensive and more RAM is better than less RAM. But everyone posting complaints without actually using a MBP for a few weeks is missing out on all the clever things you can do because it is built on USB-C. Over the past week or two with a new MacBook Pro (15in, 2.9ghz, TouchBar), I’ve been constantly surprised with how USB-C makes new things possible. It’s a kind of a hacker’s dream.

His examples make me wish the iPad Pro had a USB-C port to plug anything into it without having to buy adapters.

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iOS 10 and Default Apps→

Kirk McElhearn, writing for Macworld, returns to the issue of iOS not having the ability to set different default apps:

We’re at iOS 10, and Apple still hasn’t allowed users to make these choices. It seems ridiculous that, with a mature operating system, we’re still locked into Apple’s default apps. It’s not rocket science to make these changes; after all, there are protocols that funnel requests to specific handlers, the same way they do on the Mac. Let us choose the apps we want to use: It’s time to let iOS users have the same freedom of choice as Mac users.

I’ve argued in favor of third-party default apps many times in the past (see ‘Personalization’ here). Clearly, this isn’t a technical problem per se; I think Apple is more concerned about the strategic and security implications of default apps.

Opening up system default apps to any third-party app could result in users choosing alternatives for Apple Music, Maps, and Photos/Camera (among others). These apps are key to Apple’s ecosystem of services and iPhone experience as a whole. They are essential differentiators, unlike, say, TextEdit or Calendar. The comparison between default apps on macOS and iOS only goes so far – I believe Apple sees certain iPhone apps as more important than their Mac counterparts and critical to controlling the iOS ecosystem.

Should Apple allow a third-party to replace the Health app? What about iMessage (a new platform inside iOS) or FaceTime? Bringing user-configurable default apps to iOS isn’t as easy as flipping a switch – there are ramifications that go beyond opening .txt files in an alternative text editor on macOS.

I think there should be the option to set different defaults for some iOS apps, and I think we will get such feature, albeit in a limited fashion. Look at SiriKit and the rollout of a few domains in iOS 10.0; that’s a good indicator of how Apple tends to tackle these problems. Different default apps would be welcome for iPad productivity (especially the web browser and email client), but I’d be surprised if Apple rolled out extensive support to change just about any default system app on iOS.

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iA Writer

Federico

iA’s popular Markdown text editor isn’t appreciated enough by iOS power users. I’m guilty of this, too, and I believe part of underlying misconception is that iA Writer is a minimalistic app that lacks essential functionalities found in more popular alternatives like Ulysses and 1Writer. In practice, not only does iA Writer aptly stack...

Q&A

Question: Is there any way I can access my Drafts notes from iOS on the Mac? (Orin, @orinrezwana)

Federico

Drafts’ sync is based on CloudKit, which won’t save copies of your notes in iCloud Drive, making them accessible on all your devices. The easiest way to export notes from Drafts to view them on the...

Spotify Center: A Custom Spotify Sharing Menu

Federico

In Issue 56 of MacStories Weekly, I answered a question about Spotify automation that involved looking up lyrics for the song currently playing in Spotify. The workflow was based on a single call to the Spotify web API that returned details for a song ID passed as input. As I wrote, putting together that...

Member Requests

Question: I’d like to use a workflow to create a playlist in Apple Music from the latest 20-30 songs I added to my library and renew it every week. So every time I hit the workflow, it would update. (Darío Maestro, @maestruoso)

Federico

Fetching the last n items added to your Music library is simple...

Canvas, Episode 24: Workflow – Third-Party Apps→

This week Fraser and Federico continue the Workflow series by looking at integrating Workflow with third-party apps.

In the latest episode of Canvas, our Workflow series continues with an in-depth look at third-party app integrations and several examples of our own workflows.

If you haven’t listened to the previous episodes of the series yet, you’ll want to go back and start from there.

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Improving Integration with Apple Music for iOS Apps→

Allen Pike has a good summary of how limited the media player framework is on iOS, especially for developers who want to create apps that integrate with Apple Music:

In the meantime, these limitations mean that any music app that attempts to play Apple Music tracks will be seriously limited, require odd workarounds, and behave problematically depending on user behaviour. In the spirit of giving users a quality experience, we’re stuck with the same limitation that other sophisticated audio apps have today: no Apple Music.

The explanation is a bit technical in places, but I think we can all relate to some limitations he details: apps can’t modify Music playlists on the user’s behalf, queue management is severely limited, and fading a song out is a private API.

There could be an entire ecosystem of music utilities and alternative players based on the streaming service – think how professional DJ apps, tagging services like Shazam and SoundHound, or music discovery apps could take advantage of a direct integration with Apple Music. I hope Apple will consider some of these suggestions for next year.

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