Federico Viticci

10873 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

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Fantastical Adds Lion Support, And We’re Giving Away 10 Codes

Fantastical is a calendar assistant that works with Apple’s iCal and the popular third-party BusyCal software, allowing you to quickly creates event in your default system calendar with plain English. Thanks to a built-in natural language parser, Fantastical lets you write down something like “Get a new MacBook Air tomorrow at Apple Store at 5 PM”, and see the sentence becoming a new event with all the necessary fields already filled in your calendar. And because Fantastical directly plugs into calendar accounts configured on your Mac, you won’t need to enter your information again.

Fantastical 1.0.3, released today, adds full Lion compatibility and a new Lion-only feature that allows you to swipe with two fingers to move between months in the calendar. The animation is really nice, and reminds me of Safari’s new feature for navigating webpages with a two-finger swipe on Lion. Among various bug fixes, Fantastical also adds a new color menubar icon preference, a last-selected calendar option, and several parsing engine fixes.

You can read our initial review of Fantastical here, and buy the app from the Mac App Store. However, the Flexibits developers have been kind enough to offer 10 promo codes to celebrate the next major release of OS X with MacStories readers, so if you’re interested in the giveaway jump after the break for the full details of how to enter. Read more

Sparrow 1.3 Brings Lion Support, Interface Changes

Sparrow started out as a minimal, Tweetie-like email experiment for Mac back in October of last year and, following the success of the public beta, eventually evolved into a powerful desktop solution to access Gmail and IMAP email accounts using new interface concepts inspired by iOS apps, Mac gems like Twitter and Reeder, or other changes previewed by Apple in Lion. As we reported in our previous coverage, the latest big update to the app, Sparrow 1.2, went as far as adding social support with Facebook integration,  Gravatar support, and more.

Sparrow 1.3 was approved yesterday, but the developers had to quickly pull it from sale as a critical bug that caused the app to crash was discovered. After apologizing for the technical error and uploading a patched version for non-Mac App Store users, the team announced a fix had been already submitted with the request of an expedited review from Apple. Personally, I updated to Sparrow 1.3 yesterday and didn’t experience any issues, but I decided to hold my coverage until the promised fix would be available on the App Store – more importantly, the entire app had to come back on Apple’s servers as the developers pulled it to make sure no one would install a “buggy” version. Read more

Stylapps, A Beautiful Showcase of Stylish iPad Apps

As a geek, I’m always excited about the next great app that may solve one of the annoyances in my workflow or provide a better solution to a problem I didn’t know I had. Whilst functionality is still king when it comes down to choosing the proper tools to administer our workflows and check things off our to-do manager, more often than not we’re also looking for beautiful software that meets our iOS expectations for elegant interfaces and intuitive navigation schemes. Stylapps, a free iPad app released in late June, aggregates “stylish iPad applications” that are becoming increasingly difficult to find in the tumultuous sea of daily App Store releases.

Stylapps starts up with an elegant grid of iPad screenshots placed against a light background that greatly contributes to enhancing the colors of the apps that are being presented on screen. The app comes with refresh and search buttons to find your way through specific releases, but more importantly there is a filter icon in the upper left corner that allows you to pick certain categories to check out new apps released on the App Store and hand-picked by Stylapps. So if you don’t want to learn about stylish new Games, but you’re in for a Productivity and Business treat, you can drill down into the aforementioned categories and start looking for new apps that may suit your needs. Screenshots in the main page are large enough to provide a quick preview of what you’re looking at, however you can also tap on a thumbnail to open a single-app view with description, iTunes screenshots, App Store button and a link back to the developer’s website. To go back to the main list, you just have to swipe your finger on screen; a two-finger swipe lets you jump 10 pages of app picks. A “star” button next to each thumbnail enables you to save an app to your favorites, a section that lives locally on your iPad to collect apps you may want to check out later.

Stylapps’ curated section of beautiful and stylish apps quite resembles my tastes, but in my tests I’ve found the app to be far from perfect as far as stability goes. I’ve experienced a few crashes when navigating between pages, and a bug with opening screenshots will sometime “freeze” the app into a lightbox overlay mode that will force you to quit and re-open.

Still, these issues occurred rarely and I was able to browse the selection of software offered by Stylapps to find some interesting new apps I hadn’t covered here on MacStories. Stylapps is free, looks very nice on the iPad, and it’ll probably help you find the next gorgeous app you didn’t know about.

Airfoil, Reemote and AirPlay: A Multi-Speaker Wireless Setup

When I first covered the 4.5 update for Airfoil, which added extended AirPlay support and remote controls for compatible apps, a reader suggested an interesting hack or, better, workflow for wireless audio in the comments: given Airfoil’s capability of sending audio from a single source to multiple speakers or devices at once, it was possible to send audio from iOS to the Mac using AirServer, and then pass along data from AirServer (which acts as an AirPlay receiver on the Mac) to speakers recognized by Airfoil. Later, another reader chimed in to say that, considering Airfoil’s recent improvements, there was no need to install a separate app – Airfoil Speakers itself could handle the AirPlay stream from iOS to OS X, and then be used as an input source in Airfoil. When combined with an app like Reemote, this setup would allow you to send audio from an iPhone or iPad to the Mac wirelessly, from the Mac to another set of speakers or computers, and then control everything from iOS. Read more

Twitter and Google+ Polls: The iPad’s “Must-Have” & Top Productivity Apps

Over the past two months, I’ve run what I consider an interesting experiment with my Twitter and Google+ followers: I’ve asked them what their favorite iPad apps were, and noted down the results. More specifically, back in May I asked my Twitter followers what their “5 must-have” iPad apps were. That question included all the possible categories of the App Store, free and paid apps, universal and iPad-only apps – literally anything that could run natively on the iPad. I received dozens of replies, saved the results as “votes” in Evernote, and filed the note away for future usage. Then on July 13th, I asked about “top productivity apps” on Google+. This second poll was more specific: whereas the first one was just a matter of personal preference for any category and app type, the Google+ poll implied that people had to decide what they considered “productive” on the iPad. And because I was asking people, and not a computer-generated algorithm, the results of what people considered as “productive” were noteworthy. I waited a few days, saved the replies as votes, and created another note in Evernote.

The results are listed below but before you jump after the break, a disclaimer: by no means this is an official “poll” or “survey” – it’s just the results of two questions I asked with my personal accounts on Twitter and Google+. I don’t know each person that follows me on these social networks, but if I had to guess – I’d say they’re mostly geeks passionate about great apps and new software. For this reason the demographic of these polls is pretty much restricted to a certain category of App Store users – those who spend time browsing for new apps, care about the quality of design and, when possible, like solutions that are available cross-platform on the Mac and iOS.

That said, check out the Top Productivity Apps and Must-Have iPad Apps after the break. Read more

What Does An Image Leak Suggest About Next Week?

 

Over the past few weeks, a number of “leaks” from Apple’s supply chain and retail operations suggested the company was on track to launch the next major version of OS X, Lion, alongside new Macs this week, more specifically yesterday, July 14. According to the rumors, Apple was gearing up to unveil new MacBook Airs, Mac minis and white MacBooks all featuring updated Sandy Bridge processors from Intel and Thunderbolt connectivity. Whilst rumors about Lion immediately sounded fairly accurate as Apple seeded the “Golden Master” version of the OS to developers on July 1 (unless major issues are discovered, the GM version usually matches the public release’s build number and codebase) and the company said at the WWDC Lion would be available in July, speculation about new Macs generated from a series of factors that had been capturing the interest of the tech press since February. Read more

Apple Releases iOS 4.3.4 [Direct Links]

Apple has just released iOS 4.3.4 in iTunes. The new firmware should be available now if you check for updates, and it is supposed to fix an issue that allows jailbreaking an iOS 4.3.3 device through a PDF vulnerability. Apple describes the technical fixes in a  support document:

Impact: Viewing a maliciously crafted PDF file may lead to an unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution

Description: A buffer overflow exists in FreeType’s handling of TrueType fonts. Viewing a maliciously crafted PDF file may lead to an unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution.

Users who have jailbroken their devices using JailbreakMe will obviously need to stay away from the update if they want to keep Cydia and other installed jailbreak tweaks – Apple had already confirmed a fix was coming to patch the PDF security hole that could allow for other malicious exploits, not necessarily related to jailbreak.

Here are the direct links for iOS 4.3.4:

Apple has also released iOS 4.2.9 for the Verizon iPhone, which you can download here.

LogMeIn Updates: Full Lion Support, Ignition Gets Better File Manager

LogMeIn, the powerful remote desktop sharing tool that offers a variety of other services for professionals and businesses, released a series of updates in the past week to enhance support for file management in Ignition, the iOS app we’ve reviewed here on MacStories, and bring full OS X Lion support to LogMeIn Free, Pro and Ignition desktop users. With a blog post this morning,  the company has announced a compatibility update that resolves the issues when trying to connect to a machine running Lion, rumored to be publicly released next week. I have tested the update (which can be installed by opening LogMeIn’s preferences, then About->Check for Updates) on my two Macs running OS X Lion GM and I successfully managed to log in (both via screen sharing and file manager) from my iPad, iPhone, and the web. Read more

Tweetbot Gets Initial Push Notification Support

Tweetbot, the Twitter client “with personality” we reviewed a while ago and followed as the developers introduced new features and fixes, has received a major update to version 1.4 that adds a new important functionality, highly requested by the app’s userbase: push notifications. Alongside various bug fixes, selected tabs now remembered when switching accounts, and lists from Twitter users viewable as tweets, Tweetbot 1.4 comes with a new Push Notifications service in the Settings that allows you to be notified about incoming DMs, replies, follows and unfollows, and so forth. The supported Twitter services are many, however the developers have decided to limit the rollout of push notifications for now, mentioning scaling issues and API limitations from Twitter. As Tapbots wants to ensure an optimal experience for everyone, make sure their push notification servers hold up to the new traffic (enabling push notifications for an app – especially a Twitter client – isn’t as easy as most people think) and avoid delays in notification delivery, the initial rollout of Tweetbot push notifications will allow 1,000 users to sign up on a first come, first serve basis. In the following weeks, the limit will be raised to 10,000 users. Please keep in mind that right now – the app has just started propagating in the iTunes Store – notifications might take a while to become active as Tapbots set up the new service. Read more