Federico Viticci

10779 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

Canvas, Episode 12: Programming on iOS→

The mission of Canvas has always been to illuminate the parts of iOS that people think cant be done. In that spirit, this week Fraser and Federico dig into how to program on iOS.

We take a look at both traditional Integrated Development Environment tools such as Pythonista and Codea and block-based programming tools like Editorial, Workflow and Hopscotch.

Just ahead of WWDC, Fraser and I prepared a special episode of Canvas all about programming on iOS. It’ll be interesting to see how outdated this will be by next week. You can listen here.

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Apple Starts Decorating Moscone West for WWDC 2016

Apple has started decorating Moscone West in San Francisco for WWDC, kicking off this year on Monday, June 13.

Every year, Apple decorates the convention center with different sets of banners: the ones matching the event’s tagline and graphics already available on the WWDC website, and others showing the official (and previously unseen) logos of new versions of iOS and OS X. For the first time, Apple will hold this year’s opening keynote at the Bill Graham auditorium, with technical sessions and labs to be held as usual at Moscone during the week.

Apple is expected to introduce iOS 10, watchOS 3, tvOS 10, and the next version of OS X, likely to be renamed “macOS”. While rumors have been scarce, previous reports indicated Apple could bring Siri to the Mac, introduce a Siri API for developers, and redesign their Music app.

Apple has begun decorating Moscone West with its logo earlier today, and, like every year, we’re documenting the process with photos from San Francisco. With preparations now well underway, Apple will continue to decorate Moscone West with new banners in the next few days, possibly showing the official logos for iOS 10 and OS X 10.12.

We will update this post with more photos throughout the week; new updates will be listed in reverse chronological order below.

You can follow @MacStoriesNet on Twitter or our WWDC 2016 news hub for updates.

Our thanks to the Workflow team for providing us with photos from Moscone West in San Francisco.

June 11, 2016 9:00 AM

June 10, 2016

BitCam→

The Iconfactory has launched BitCam, a new iPhone app inspired by old Macintosh apps. BitCam lets you take pictures and apply retro filters such as dithering. It’s fun and it makes people like Stephen Hackett happy.

Even if I can’t relate to it because I didn’t live in the Macintosh era, my favorite part of BitCam is the care The Iconfactory put into making everything feel retro and old. The icons in the app are intentionally low-res and menus don’t appear with a standard iOS animation. The app has credits that scroll and there’s throttling to simulate how old computers would react to more advanced settings, such as higher-res colors.

Even better, the entire website is styled to feel old: it’s an .html page, it has an animated “under construction” GIF, a “webmaster” email address, and multiple references to “application store” instead of App Store. I can’t think of a better way to celebrate The Iconfactory’s 20th anniversary.

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Workflow Adds IFTTT Integration

One of the unique traits of Workflow is its integration with native iPhone and iPad apps. By abstracting URL schemes from the process of building workflows that communicate with apps, the Workflow team has been able to offer actions to automate apps such as OmniFocus, Drafts, and Ulysses with support for text, images, and even documents.

Increasingly, however, iOS users who rely on their devices as their primary computers are leveraging web services for their daily tasks. And in the past few years, a different kind of automation – web automation – has complemented (if not replaced altogether) native automation to save time on the iPhone and iPad through web APIs.

The Workflow team knows this, and their latest integration is aimed at extending Workflow to any web service – even if it doesn’t offer an iOS app or a native web action in Workflow. Today, Workflow is launching a new IFTTT integration to trigger web recipes.

By fusing workflow actions with the power of IFTTT’s web API glue, IFTTT support in Workflow promises to take iOS automation further than it’s ever been, drastically altering the scope of Workflow’s capabilities.

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“A Lot of Maintenance”→

Lauren Goode, writing for The Verge, on Phil Schiller’s subscription comments:

Schiller imagines scenarios where many kinds of apps that were previously single-time purchases could move to the model. Games that have an ongoing subscription-like program, ones that have a massive online playing world that require upgrades of game worlds, might make sense. He suggests many enterprise apps could move to subscription, and that professional apps that require “a lot of maintenance of new features and versions” would be a good fit.

Taking Schiller’s comment at face value, it does sound like developers of productivity apps will be able to experiment with subscriptions. “A lot of maintenance” applies to most of the apps I have on my devices, which use the classic paid-up-front model.

Also from the article, this semi-hidden note on a new subscription management UI coming to the App Store:

The App Store will also have a revamped interface to make it “even easier for users to manage subscriptions,” he adds.

I’ve been saving a “finally” for these buttons that are still around in iOS 9.

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