Federico Viticci

10775 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

Pedometer++ Hits One Million Downloads→

David Smith, on his app Pedometer++ hitting one million downloads on the App Store:

Pedometer++ has become one of the most important apps in my portfolio and probably the app I’m now most widely known for.

It also carries with it an attribute that I’ve never experienced with any of my other projects—a sense of doing genuine good. I have had countless reports of how it has help people get healthier, recover from injury or lose weight. These are the stories that really impact me as a developer. The thought that something I made in my basement can have extended and improved people’s lives is truly remarkable.

David’s commitment to the app through the years is equally remarkable. Pedometer++ is one of the apps that is helping me live a healthier lifestyle, and it improved so much since the original version (which we first covered here).

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NYT Now: Your Guide to the News [Sponsor]

Never know what news is the most important to read about? Do you spend too much time searching your social media accounts looking for reliable news? Head to the App Store and download NYT Now for free.

NYT Now is the fastest way to get caught up with the news, with headlines and story summaries that get readers caught up quickly. Designed for iPhone and on-the-go consumption, NYT Now offers a selection of the best articles from The New York Times, as well as stories from around the web curated and hand-picked by a team of NYT editors. NYT Now even includes a daily Morning Briefing, designed to prepare you for the day ahead.

The New York Times released version 2.0 of NYT Now today, which I’ve personally been testing for the past week and find excellent. The biggest news is that the app is now completely free with no need to pay a subscription and no cap on the number of articles you can read – it’s free and unlimited.

The app itself has received a refreshed user interface, with cards that indicate what an article is about and a sharing menu that supports iOS 8 extensions and even the ability to share articles with image previews on Twitter (see example). I find the app to offer a great mix of NYT content and editorial picks from the web: I’ve been discovering and saving articles through NYT Now, and I appreciate the variety and balance of topics and authors presented in the app on a daily basis.

Head to the App Store and download NYT Now or visit nytnow.com to learn more. Remember, it’s now completely free to download and use.

Our thanks to The New York Times for sponsoring MacStories this week.

Apple’s Spotlight Location Icons→

Fascinating look by Rusty Mitchell (via Sebastiaan de With) at Apple’s location icons, used in Spotlight for iOS 8:

In our iOS 8 UI Kit for Illustrator post, I mentioned becoming obsessed with finding all of Apple’s new Spotlight Location icons. I was excited to discover these icons because they are the first large-scale generalized set of pictograms created by Apple, and I was curious to see the depth of the set and how harmonious it is when viewed together. To date I’ve been able to locate 96 of these icons, but there are a few that I have seen in Maps that I haven’t been able to trigger in Spotlight. I’m sure there are still others that I have yet to find at all. In this post, I want to take a moment to highlight a little about the icons and then — since you can only search Spotlight for nearby locations — give some instructions on how to create a GPX file and use Xcode’s handy Simulate Location feature to search for location types that may not be available near you.

As Sebastiaan also notes, I’d love an in-depth look at Apple’s landmark icons used in Maps but absent from Spotlight results (here’s the Colosseum in Rome and Duomo in Milan, as shown in Apple Maps).

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Redesigning Overcast’s Apple Watch App→

Great post by Marco Arment detailing how he redesigned Overcast for Apple Watch after he actually tried the device:

I’m much happier with the new app.

Trying to match the structure of the iOS app was a mistake. For most types of apps, the Apple Watch today is best thought of not as a platform to port your app to, but a simple remote control or viewport into your iPhone app.

My initial app was easier to conceptualize and learn, and it closely matched the iOS app. But it just wasn’t very good in practice, and wasn’t usually better than taking out my phone.

I wonder how many developers will go through the same process after using the Watch on a daily basis.

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Virtual: I Didn’t Understand the Concept of Dating→

This week Federico and Myke talk about the Oculus Rift release date, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5, the Yooka and Laylee Kickstarter, Nintendo’s annual results, and Splatoon.

A fun episode of Virtual this week, as usual filled with personal stories and memories of videogames in our lives. You can listen here.

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‘I’ve Been Texting With an Astronaut’→

Laura Hudson writes about Lifeline, an ingenious text-based adventure game for iOS that uses a messaging-like interface and actionable notifications to build a story and a relationship with the main character.

As counterintuitive as it sounds, there’s something about interacting with Taylor through text messages that can feel very intimate, perhaps because we’ve grown so accustomed to communicating our most personal thoughts with our friends through bursts of text—and waiting for their responses with bated breath.

While some mobile games intentionally frustrate players with waiting periods to compel them into spending money, waiting isn’t a coercion tactic in Lifelife, but rather a crucial part of the experience. If you die several times—or win the game—you can unlock an optional “fast mode” that allows you to skip the waiting periods, although I wouldn’t recommend it. While it might offer instant gratification, it also shatters the sense of immersion you feel, flattening the urgency and anticipation of those intermediate moments.

I love mobile games that try to do something out of the ordinary, and I’m intrigued by this idea. Lifeline is $2.99 on the App Store and you can also play it on your Apple Watch.

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Connected: June Is the New Christmas→

This week, the Europeans and Stephen are joined by Christina Warren to discuss Microsoft’s move in the mobile space and how it relates to iOS. Then, they talk about third-party Apple Watch bands and what Apple could do with Beats Audio.

Christina did an excellent job at condensing news from Microsoft’s Build 2015 event in this week’s Connected. You can listen to the episode here.

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Instagram’s Machine Learning for Emoji Trends→

From the Instagram Engineering blog, a fascinating look at how Instagram used machine learning to understand the meaning, association, and usage of emoji by their users.

Having learned a good representation for emoji, we can begin to ask questions about similarity. Namely, for a given emoji, what English words are semantically similar? For each emoji, we compute the “angle” (equivalently the cosine similarity) between it and other words. Words with a small angle are said to be similar and provide a natural, English-language translation for that emoji.

The post contains examples of what people mean by popular emoji and a semantic map of symbols. Pretty incredible data analysis.

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