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.
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@viticci.macstories.net
viticci@macstories.net

iPhone App Transmits GPS Data to WiFi iPad Using Personal Hotspot

Back in March, a series of reports from several blogs and publications claimed a WiFi-only iPad connected to an iPhone via Personal Hotspot was able to receive GPS data through the established connection, even if the iPad itself didn’t have any GPS capabilities. If GPS data was being transmitted thanks to Personal Hotspot, many speculated getting a 3G iPad was basically useless as the last advantage of internal GPS could be replaced by an iPhone and proper tethering. With Personal Hotspot and wireless GPS data transmission, many said, users could install navigation software on a WiFi-only iPad and obtain GPS points thanks, again, to Personal Hotspot and iOS 4.3. However, while the reports about WiFi iPads displaying semi-accurate locations in the Maps app were accurate, rumors about GPS and Personal Hotspot were quickly debunked as, it turned out, a WiFi iPad couldn’t rely on tethering for location purposes for more than a few minutes, as also demoed on video here. Rather, it seemed like a WiFi iPad could get location info while on the move thanks to WiFi access point and hotspot discovery – considering the recent debate on Apple and location cache, this doesn’t surprise anymore.

As it usually happens in the Apple community, though, what started as an inaccurate report or a simple proof of concept eventually turned into an app available for download on the App Store. AirLocation, a $0.99 universal app released today, enables WiFi iPad users to achieve the workflow described above: once connected to an iPhone using Personal Hotspot, an iPad running AirLocation will be able to fetch accurate GPS data from the iPhone and update your location in real-time as you move. AirLocation will have to run on the iPhone as well in order for the whole setup to work. I’ve personally tested the application during a 20-minute car trip to Viterbo, my town, and it really works as advertised: although AirLocation doesn’t come with all the features of the Maps app for iOS, it does keep track of your location in real-time on the iPad using GPS and it didn’t stop working after a few minutes. I could see the blue dot indicating my location moving on screen at the same time of the iPhone, which was transmitting data via Personal Hotspot.

AirLocation doesn’t come with many functionalities, but it does one thing well: getting accurate GPS data with iOS 4.3’s Personal Hotspot. Get it here.

Steve Jobs Discusses Location Tracking, Privacy→

Steve Jobs Discusses Location Tracking, Privacy

Ina Fried at Mobilized reports some excerpts from a phone interview with Steve Jobs about the location tracking issues also addressed by Apple this morning:

The files they found on these phones, as we explained, it turned out were basically files we have built through anonymous, crowdsourced information that we collect from the tens of millions of iPhones out there.

He said Apple looks forward to testifying before Congress and other regulatory bodies and said the company will do what it can to clarify things further. “I think Apple will be testifying,” Jobs said. “They have asked us to come and we will honor their request of course.

Steve Jobs also reiterated the statements from today’s Q&A, saying much of the speculation last week arose from “wrong conclusions” – generated by the fact that Apple, and the tech industry overall, failed at educating users about several aspects of location data, anonymous tracking and privacy:

As new technology comes into the society there is a period of adjustment and education,” Jobs said. “We haven’t as an industry done a very good job educating people I think, as to some of the more subtle things going on here. As such (people) jumped to a lot of wrong conclusions in the last week.

Update: Mobilized has updated their original post with an edited transcript of the interview with Jobs, Schiller, and Forstall. Other interesting tidbits:

Is there anything that you guys have learned over the last week or so and take away from this?

Forstall: One thing I think we have learned is that, the cache we had on the system, the point of that cache, is we do all the location calculations on the phone itself so no location calculations are done separately. You can imagine in ideal world the entire crowdsourced database is on the phone and it just never has to talk to a server to do these calculations (or) to even get the cache.

What we do is we cache a subset of that. We picked a size, around 2MB, which is less than half a song. It turns out it was fairly large and could hold items for a long time.

We had that protected on the system. It had root protection and was sandboxed from any other application. But if someone hacks their phone and jailbreaks it, they can get to this and misunderstand the point of that.

It’s all anonymous and cannot be traced back to any individual phone or person. But we need to be even more careful about what files are on the phone, even if they are protected.

Schiller: Sometimes it helps people to understand an analogy that describes what these things are like because they are so new. I would think an analogy of a crowdsourced database is every time you walk into a retail store, many retailers have a clicker that counts how many people come in and out of the store. Nobody really cares about that because it is completely anonymous. It is not personal data. It is not anything to worry about. It’s not something that people feel is private because it is really not about them. It’s a coagulated total of all traffic. These crowdsourced databases are sort of like that.

Things like that aren’t so scary when you think about them in everyday terms.

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Google Chrome 11 Officially Released In Stable Channel

A few minutes ago, Google announced the release in the Stable Channel of Google Chrome 11 for Mac, Windows and Linux machines. The new version (labelled 11.0.696.57) has been in development for months in the beta and developer channels, hitting the “stable” status (meaning it’s ready for public consumption and download from Chrome’s official page) today. Google Chrome comes with several bug fixes and performance enhancement, and it contains “some really great improvements including speech input through HTML” – announced by the Google team here. With this feature, you’ll be able, for example, to literally “speak” some words to translate to another language in Google Translate, and have the results available as text in the browser.

You can check for updates in Chrome 10 to download the new Stable version, or start a direct download here.

White iPhone’s Proximity Sensor and Death Grip Demoed On Video

The saga is over. The white iPhone 4 is finally launching tomorrow in 28 countries after a 10-month delay, and Apple seems to be pretty happy about it so much that they’ve decided to dedicate a special spot to the device on the company’s homepage. Well then, what’s so different about the white iPhone - you may ask. Not much: it’s white, and it’s got a different proximity sensor design, quite possibly due to the use of white paint. But besides this minor design “feature”, it’s just an iPhone 4 running iOS 4.3.1 by default (you’ll have to upgrade to 4.3.2 if you buy one tomorrow) and coming with a fancy new retail box.

Italian website iSpazio, however, decided to test the white iPhone 4 [Google Translation] they managed to buy yesterday ahead of the official launch, to see whether or not the new proximity sensor works better than the one found in the black iPhone. Together with that, they ran the usual “death grip” test – with the obvious result that the iPhone seems to lose one bar, but signal isn’t compromised. Again, since the software updates Apple released last year the “death grip” hasn’t been much of a problem for anyone: though, it’s become part of the unboxing and testing tradition Apple fans rely on for each new product launch.

The demo videos are embedded below. In case you missed it, check out the first white iPhone unboxing video here.
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Apple, Location Services & The “Improved Traffic Service”

In Apple’s official response to the location tracking issue uncovered by security researchers last week, an interesting tidbit seems to confirm that the company is seriously committed to delivering improved mapping and navigation software to iPhone users by focusing on building a new “traffic service” to roll out publicly in the next couple of years. From the Q&A:

What other location data is Apple collecting from the iPhone besides crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data?

Apple is now collecting anonymous traffic data to build a crowd-sourced traffic database with the goal of providing iPhone users an improved traffic service in the next couple of years.

The wording of the statement isn’t clear (some suggest “traffic” may be related to “internet traffic” according to specific locations), but let’s just play along and assume it’s linked to the turn-by-turn navigation software and new mapping features for iOS devices Apple has been rumored to be working on for a very long time. If “traffic” is related to navigation and mobile maps, there’s plenty room for speculation after today’s press release: in the past years, several job listings on Apple’s website hinted at open positions in the iOS team for map engineers and navigation experts, suggesting that Apple was working on its own proprietary solution to ditch Google Maps on the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. The acquisitions of mapping companies Placebase and Poly9 in 2009 and 2010, respectively, gave some credence to the reports that pointed at Apple willing to become the next major player in the mobile mapping scene. Read more

Apple Confirms: White iPhone Tomorrow

With a press release that just went out, Apple confirmed that the white iPhone is launching tomorrow. After much speculation and several units already sold in Belgium and Italy, Apple finally announced that the white iPhone will be available on Thursday, April 28, in 28 countries. In the United States, it will be available both on AT&T and Verizon Wireless. Price is the same of the black iPhone 4: $199 for the 16 GB model and $299 for the 32 GB, with a two-year contract.

The white iPhone 4 has finally arrived and it’s beautiful,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “We appreciate everyone who has waited patiently while we’ve worked to get every detail right.

The white iPhone will be available tomorrow in Austria, Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Macau, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland, Sweden, Taiwan, Thailand, UK and the US.
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MobileRSS for iPad Comes with New UI, Feed Management, Article Downloads

Deeply criticized by the iOS community in the past months for being too similar to Silvio Rizzi’s Reeder, MobileRSS by NibiruTech recently went under a major update and facelift. When I was told a few weeks ago to give a try to the app again, I was a little skeptical: how could there be an improvement when the previous version was so clearly inspired (to an extent, one could have called it a “rip-off”) by another app? Fortunately, my skepticism – while reasonable – couldn’t do anything about the fact that the new MobileRSS HD for iPad is a well-crafted application. Sure, it still hints at Reeder and Twitter for iPad in some interface schemes and navigation methods, but who doesn’t nowadays, honestly? The new standards created by popular apps like Twitter (panels, sliding actions, pull to refresh), Reeder (more vertical panels, popups) and Apple itself (landscape sidebars, popovers) can now be seen in hundreds of different applications from the most variegate categories. And if we refer to some of these features as “standards”, there’s nothing much to rip-off at this point.

MobileRSS Pro perhaps won’t replace Reeder and Mr. Reader on my homescreen, as the developers still have some issues to iron out (specifically with the unread items list not removing a selected read article after a refresh) and some interface changes to refine around the edges. From what I’ve seen so far, though, the app provides a very solid alternatives to the feed readers mentioned above: MobileRSS HD has got support for multiple Google Reader accounts, it lets you add and remove subscriptions thanks to full feed management (like Mr. Reader), and it’s got plenty of sharing options to forward interesting articles to Twitter, Facebook, Instapaper, Read It Later, Delicious, and email. The app allows you to choose fonts from a popup menu, as well as change font size for optimal reading. On top of that, you also have classic Google Reader options like mark as read / unread, like, share, and note. Most of these functionalities have been implemented through popup menus that, with the new default dark theme, look really good on the iPad’s screen. The app is stable, fast and reliable – pretty snappy on the iPad 2, too.

Two features that particularly impressed me in this new version of MobileRSS are swiping actions and the possibility to download full articles for feeds that only come with excerpts. In the settings, you can select websites that have truncated feeds, and tell the app to always download the full content upon opening a new unread item. MobileRSS will then display an indicator showing that the full article is being fetched, and after a few seconds you’ll be able to read the entire article without jumping to a web view. On the other hand, navigating between feeds in MobileRSS looks a lot like Twitter for iPad: the main list displays unread items, and tapping on one of them will open a second panel on the right with the RSS view. The unread list will overlay the left sidebar, and with a right swipe you can go back to the main view. A toggle on the left allows you to switch between “all items” and “unread items.”

Overall, I think NibiruTech is doing a good job in differentiating MobileRSS from other RSS apps for the iPad, yet implementing concepts and UI elements that have become standards on the platform thanks to third-party software adoption. MobileRSS HD is available at $4.99 in the App Store, and you should give it a try. Read more

Omni Group Releases OmniPlan 2.0 Public Beta

Back at Macworld 2011, the Omni Group detailed their software plans for 2011 on iPhones, iPads and Macs: the company announced they were working on a major revamp of OmniFocus for Mac inspired by the success of the iPad counterpart, a brand new version of OmniOutliner for the iPad, and a complete upgrade of project planning tool OmniPlan built around sync functionalities and OmniFocus integration. Sync is clearly playing a huge role in the Omni Group’s efforts to centralize the experience across mobile devices and computers: last year, the Omni Group launched Omni Sync Server, a free syncing solution for Mac and iOS users that allows iPad, iPhone and Mac apps to stay in sync over the air. With the release of the first Omni Plan 2.0 public beta today, the Omni Group is bringing Omni Sync Server support to OmniPlan, alongside other collaboration features like tracking of changes and publishing.

During the OmniPlan 2.0 development, Omni Group discovered that “people wanted to bring this workflow and user experience to their teams”, so they decided to completely focus on collaboration as the big improvement for this version. With OmniPlan 2.0, a manager will be able to share a project with his team using MobileMe, WedDAV and Omni Sync Server; tasks can be published automatically upon saving a plan, and changes can be fetched via Bonjour. A manager can also keep track of his own changes or others’ through a system called “visual change tracking” – alternatively, users are also able to manually accept or reject changes on task-by-task basis. One of the most anticipated features of OmniPlan 2.0, however, is the direct OmniFocus integration announced at Macworld: while it appears that the functionality hasn’t been implemented yet in this first beta, Omni Group’s CEO Ken Case told Ars Technica in January that Omni Plan 2.0 would allow a project manager to see a person’s task coming from OmniFocus being marked as complete within OmniPlan. This will be possible thanks to the Omni Sync Server, which deploys the same underlying engine across OmniFocus, OmniPlan and, we hope, OmniOutliner.

Lots of other features found their way in OmniPlan 2.0 beta 1: filtering, filters for publishing actions, better printing support with margin customization options and advanced scheduling options are all available in this new version. You can check out a complete changelog of OP 2.0 beta 1 here.

The Omni Group also confirms OmniPlan 2.0 will be available on the Mac App Store at $199.99 once it’s released, and users who purchased OmniPlan 1.0 either from the Mac App Store or the company’s website after January 6, 2011, will receive a free upgrade. We can’t wait to see what the new OmniPlan will look like with deeper OmniFocus integration; in the meantime, you can go download the public beta here.

TenFourFox: Firefox 4.0 For 10.4 PowerPC Macs

If you’re still rocking a PowerPC Mac with a G3, G4 or G5 processor running OS X Tiger and you’re willing to try the new Firefox 4.0, you’re out of luck. With the latest major update to their Windows / Mac / Linux browser, Mozilla dropped support for Mac OS X 10.4 and PowerPC architecture, and while it’s pretty obvious that, going forward, older machines and operating systems will be left behind by software vendors, it’s always nice to find alternatives and hacks that enable users who are “stuck” on these systems to enjoy the recent advancements in technology, although with some compromises. TenFourFox, a new project from the creators of the Classila browser for classic Mac OS, is a fork of Mozilla’s Firefox 4.0 that runs on older Macs powered by Tiger and PowerPC CPUs.

But if there’s one thing we’ve learned from our years of using Macs, it’s that they outlast anything else out there. Why shouldn’t an iBook be able to look at embarrassing pictures on Facebook, or Twitter about our lunch break? These are our computers, dang it. We paid good money for them. They still work. There’s no technical reason they can’t do everything that a MacBook can. So if you want something done, you do it yourself, and we did. The result is TenFourFox.

The browser, available for download here, is a very niche product, but we’re sure it’ll manage to build a loyal following over the next months: it uses almost the same code of the official Firefox 4.0, but it’s been entirely rebuilt to add specific improvements for OS X 10.4 as it “restores the glue necessary to get most of Firefox 4’s advanced features working on our older computers” with separate builds for G3, G4 and G5 processors. TenFourFox includes most of the features of Firefox 4.0 you know and love: extended HTML5 and CSS3 support, faster Javascript rendering, WebM video, Firefox 4 add-on compatibility. According to the developers, the custom code deployed in TenFourFox granted faster Javascript performances than both Safari 5 and Firefox 3.6 through SunSpider and Dromaeo benchmarks. Apparently the code has been sent back to Mozilla so anyone could enjoy the improvements made by the team, and the devs also claims TenFourFox is by far the fastest web browser available on PowerPC Macs running Tiger. As for the requirements:

TenFourFox requires a G3 Power Macintosh, Mac OS X v10.4.11 or Mac OS X v10.5.8, 100MB of free disk space and 256MB of RAM. Video playback will be poor on systems slower than 1.25GHz; we recommend a G5. Intel Macintoshes are not supported (and will be mercilessly mocked).

You can find more information about TenFourFox here, and download the various builds on the project’s official Google Code page.