Federico Viticci

10777 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

Apple’s Next 40 Years→

Great post by Horace Dediu on how to look at Apple’s evolution over the next four decades:

My simple proposal is to think of Apple (and actually any company) as a customer creator. It creates and maintains customers. The more it creates, the more it prospers. The more customers it preserves the more it’s likely to persevere. This measure of performance for a company is not easy to obtain. It’s not a line item in any financial report.

The closest figure we have is that today Apple has one billion active devices in use. We’re not told of the total users or total customers because Apple cannot count people or wallets as accurately as it can count active devices. But as imperfect as it is, this number gives us a way to get close to counting customers.

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Shazam Gains Deeper Apple Music Integration with iOS 9.3→

One of the changes in iOS 9.3 – an API to add Apple Music tracks to playlists and the user’s library – especially made sense for apps like Shazam. And sure enough, Shazam for iOS has been updated with the ability to add tagged songs to any playlist and find all tagged songs in a ‘My Shazam Tracks’ playlist on Apple Music. There’s also support for playback of entire songs without leaving Shazam.

These features have been possible for Spotify users for a while now, and it’s nice to have them for Apple Music as well.

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Apple Airs New Apple TV Commercial Highlighting Siri, Apple Music Integration

Apple aired a new Apple TV commercial today starring Alison Brie and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau to highlight the Siri capabilities and Apple Music integration of the device.

In the ad, Brie and Coster-Waldau are practicing a kiss scene behind the scenes of a movie set by watching some sample footage on the new Apple TV. Both actors control video playback through the Siri remote, which can be used to scrub through video just by talking to it. After asking Siri to “find Game of Thrones”, the Siri remote is then used to play Jeremih from Apple Music.

The ad follows a string of short Apple TV commercials focused on quick app and game highlights. Earlier this week, Apple released tvOS 9.2 with improved Siri features, the ability to organize apps in folders, and more.

You can watch the ad below.

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Five Years of Sword & Sworcery→

“When I look back after five years, I am most surprised by how such a huge audience was willing to embrace something like Sworcery,” adds Vella. “It’s such a slow, meandering game built to be a music box for Jim’s beautiful soundtrack. You fight shapes, lose health over time, read a book that collects thoughts. You are meant to just stand and look at moody pixel art. All of it seems really damn strange. But millions of people did it. They meandered and fought shapes and stood and looked. They listened to Jim’s music. Thinking about it like that kind of floors me.”

Andrew Webster looks back at five years of one of the seminal indie games for iOS. Sword & Sworcery is still fantastic today – it’s even been updated for iOS 9 – and I can’t wait to see what Superbrothers is working on next.

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Apple Is Working on a TV Series About Apps→

Emily Steel, reporting for The New York Times:

Apple announced on Thursday that it was working with the entertainer Will.i.am and two veteran TV executives, Ben Silverman and Howard T. Owens, on a new show that will spotlight the app economy.

“One of the things with the app store that was always great about it was the great ideas that people had to build things and create things,” Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet software and services, said in an interview.

A docu-series about apps sounds like something I’d binge watch.

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The 9.7-inch iPad Pro and the Embedded Apple SIM→

Matthew Panzarino, after explaining how the embedded Apple SIM in the new iPad Pro works:

That might not sound like great news, but there is one very bright spot for anyone who wants to switch carriers later. All iPad Pro 9.7″ devices have a SIM slot right on the exterior and you can put another carrier’s SIM in that slot even if the iPad Pro itself has been locked to AT&T. In other words, the internal SIM may be locked, but you can “switch” carriers by using another physical SIM that you buy.

I was wondering how this worked. Good to know.

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