Federico Viticci

10862 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

iPads for India→

Fraser Speirs:

I’m starting a new short-term project to raise money to send iPads to the Barefoot College in India.

My friend Srini Swaminathan recently asked me if we had any iPads that we could donate to the project he’s working with in India. We didn’t actually have any right then but we are coming up to the end of our lease at school and I thought there might be an opportunity.

Our lease requires that we either send the iPads back to the leasing company or buy the lease out. To buy out, we would need to pay back the fair market value of the iPads, which is currently about £100 per unit and we have 110.

And:

Barefoot College, which was recently visited by Apple VP Lisa Jackson, is an organisation that trains women in rural India to build solar powered projects to help their villages. These projects include solar water heating, cooking, desalination and even data projectors for use in night schools.

Great initiative. You can donate here.

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Google Maps & Apple Maps: Cartography Comparison→

When I linked to Justin O’Beirne’s analysis of Google Maps in May, I asked:

It’d be interesting to see the same comparisons between Apple and Google, as well as between old Apple Maps and Apple Maps today.

Not only did Justin deliver (for context, he designed and led the development of Apple Maps’ cartography), he’s started an entire series detailing the cartography of Google Maps and Apple Maps.

At its heart, this series of essays is a comparison of the current state of Google’s and Apple’s cartography. But it’s also something more: an exploration into all of the tradeoffs that go into designing and making maps such as these.

These tradeoffs are the joy of modern cartography — the thousands of tiny, seemingly isolated decisions that coalesce into a larger, greater whole.

Our purpose here is not to crown a winner, but to observe the paths taken — and not taken.

(Can you tell he left Apple in 2015?)

I couldn’t stop reading the first post in the series, in which Justin compares the choices Google and Apple have made for displaying cities, roads, and points of interests on their maps. Utterly fascinating and amazingly detailed.

I’ve always preferred Apple’s overall design and balance of their maps (which Justin’s data confirms), but, in my experience, their data (POIs and roads) was either old or inaccurate. My area in Rome seems to have improved in the past year, and maybe I should try Apple Maps again.

I’m looking forward to Justin’s next entries in the series.

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Apple Updates WWDC App for WWDC 2016 with tvOS, iPad Multitasking Support

Apple updated their official WWDC app earlier today in preparation for the upcoming WWDC 2016.

The app, now at version 5.0, has received a new dark icon and a tvOS version to stream and download videos for WWDC 2016 on the big screen. It’s also possible to watch videos from previous conferences from the Apple TV. Live streaming is now possible on iOS and tvOS, and the iPad version also supports iOS 9 multitasking for Split View and Slide Over.

In addition to a dark interface, the update has brought a preliminary list of sessions that developers will be able to attend during the event. As it’s been the case for the past few years, Apple hasn’t included the real names of the sessions yet as they would reveal the company’s announcements beforehand. This year, Apple has opted for Swift-inspired session placeholders such as ourLips = sealedOnThisOneToo and aWatchedPot != boils. The full schedule of every technical session will be announced after the opening keynote on Monday, June 13.

You can get version 5.0 of the WWDC app from the App Store.

Annotable

As someone who reviews apps on a weekly basis and tests betas of upcoming apps every day, I often need to annotate and share screenshots. Whether I have to point out a bug or highlight a feature, image annotations are a common occurrence in my workflow. After years of half-baked utilities, Annotable has managed to...

App Debuts

Federico

iShows Games Based on the excellent iShows for iOS, iShows Games lets you keep track of upcoming videogame releases for multiple platforms. You can mark games as played or favorite, organize your library, and add new entries thanks to the Giant Bomb game database. Charm Collections are a great Twitter feature to collect and...

Member Requests

Question: Is there a way to use Workflow to access the Club MacStories archive and make a PDF from each of the underlying links? I’d love to have all of the Club MacStories content archived as PDFs in Evernote. (Dex Cure, @dexcure)

Federico

Thanks to Workflow’s Content Graph engine, it’s easy to go from a...

I Made You a Mixtape

I’ve always loved the idea of someone else making a mixtape for me.

When I was in middle school and until the first year of high school, we didn’t have the Internet at home. My parents were against buying me a PC; they thought it was a waste of time. Unlike many of my friends, I depended on books and magazines for my school research and hobbies. I was a voracious reader.

That was 2002. I wasn’t exactly a music fan back then: I heard music on the radio in my mom’s car on the way to school in the morning, and I occasionally slid my dad’s cassette tapes in our Siemens Club 793 stereo, but he only listened to Italian music. I wanted the English stuff.

Until one day my friend Luca told me about MP3s and compact discs with hundreds of songs on them. By leaving his computer plugged in all night, he explained elatedly, he could download any music he wanted from the Internet using programs with exotic names I had never heard – WinMX, eMule, iMesh. Then, all those songs could be “burned” onto a CD as MP3s, and I could play them back for as long as I wanted with a CD player.

I was 14, we were chatting after school, and I didn’t know what piracy was. And then, the surprise: because he knew I didn’t have the Internet (or a computer), he had made a sample CD for me with about 30 songs on it. He gave me the CD, told me to buy a CD player for myself, and he concluded with “Get back to me soon about the songs you like. I put in a bit of everything except Italian music”.

Fourteen years ago, I was handed the first mixtape someone ever made for me.

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When iCloud Works

Federico

I’ve had my fair share of criticism for iCloud since 2011. What I don’t usually write about, however, is my experience with iCloud in the past couple of years – particularly after going all-in with iOS and modern iCloud-based apps. Like millions of others, my iCloud account began as a MobileMe subscription in the...