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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“Select Developers” Testing iPhone 4 Prototypes Running A5 Chip?

According to a report by 9to5mac, Apple has begun testing a prototype version of the iPhone running the A5 chip with “select developers.” The units, carrying the usual Apple model numbers for prototypes, are apparently based on the iPhone 4 hardware, with the only exception of the Apple A5 processor – clearly aimed at enhancing speed and graphics performances on the next-generation device. The report goes on to say these modified iPhones featuring the A5 CPU have been given to “high-level gaming outfits” in order to start writing gaming applications for the iPhone 5 that will, allegedly, be announced in September. As with the first-generation iPad, Apple is forcing these developers to keep the prototypes in a safe in the company’s offices at night – likely under strict surveillance from Apple employees or security staff.

Apple isn’t taking the next iPhone’s A5-power lightly. They already have select developers working on versions of their iPhone applications that take full advantage of the next-generation iPhone’s speedier and much more powerful hardware. These developers, seemingly from high-level gaming outfits, have been given what is essentially an iPhone 4 but with an A5 processor instead of an A4. The device itself is virtually identical to the iPhone 4, and there is no way anyone can tell it’s not an iPhone 4 based on the phone’s exterior.

According to the report, these early units are nothing but modified iPhone 4s with an A5 chip inside – even the OS is the same iOS 4 that’s currently shipping to customers, only slightly tweaked to work with the new processor. As far as the design goes, these developers haven’t seen anything about the next-generation iPhone that’s not already available to the public with the iPhone 4. From a software perspective, it makes sense to start giving prototypes of a device that’s going to be very similar to the final version away to developers now: the A5 processor will surely find its way in the iPhone 5, and game developers will have plenty of time to test their improved graphics. And as soon as iOS will be previewed at the WWDC ‘11 and released in beta form, these same developers will have a chance to test an A5-enabled iPhone running the new OS.

If the iPhone 5 is really going to be a minor refresh of the existing iPhone hardware, being able to test the A5 – which will likely be the most important addition – five months ahead of the rumored release date must sound like a great plan to these developers.

ListBook: A Simple List App for iPhone

ListBook, a new iPhone app from the developers of MoneyBook, wants to be the simplest solution to create lists on an iPhone, and check off completed items with ease. The App Store is full of apps that enable you to create lists: just think about Simplenote, the popular note-taking application for iPhone and iPad (and the web) that, among other things, also allows you to convert notes to lists. Not to mention the hundreds – if not thousands – of Dropbox-enabled apps that you can use to set up quick shopping lists, todos and reminders and have them always available anywhere you go. The ListBook’s developers, though, recognize that setting up a Dropbox account and having to mess with plain text files, folders and, why not, Markdown support might be a pattern average iPhone users aren’t ready to learn. We, as geeks, love to fiddle with OTA sync, filenames and tags: the majority of iPhone users, however, might not want to do that. And that’s why ListBook doesn’t come with any of these features, but still enables you to create lists, with a beautiful interface and a clever use of gestures.

In ListBook, you create lists and assign new items to them. There are no due dates or tags – you just check off an item once it’s been taken care of. Every list can have a name, as well as a badge on the homescreen to tell you how many tasks you still have to complete. There is no sync or iPad version, no web app or Dropbox integration. You can navigate between lists in a Safari-like UI that displays lists as “pages” in the browser; you can also pinch & zoom to reveal a list and close it.

ListBook won’t satisfy the geeks, but it should be a good alternative to Apple’s Notes app for most iPhone users. Get it in the App Store at $0.99.

iCade iPad Arcade Cabinet Now Available, But Backordered

What began as an April Fools’ joke based off the concept of enabling iPad users to turn their device into an old-style arcade cabinet – the iCade – eventually became a real product with Atari’s official backing and a slew of games built specifically for the cabinet’s Bluetooth-based controls. When the product was “unveiled”, many thought that, in spite of the actual quality of the joke, it would never see the light of day. However, as we saw in January, ThinkGeek announced that the iCade made it after the design and pre-production stage and was set to go on sale this Spring.

And indeed, the iCade became available at $100 earlier today, only to be backordered until May within a few hours of online sales. If you were looking to buy an iCade before Easter: I’m sorry, you’ll have to wait. But of course, there’s always the DIY way to come to the rescue. [ThinkGeek via Engadget]

iPhone Location Tracking A Bug To Be Fixed In Next iOS Update?

Following yesterday’s debate on a file discovered by two security researchers that keeps track of your entire location history in the form of cellular triangulation data stored unencrypted in the iPhone’s backup, Daring Fireball’s John Gruber weighed in to suggest this might be a simple bug or “an oversight” on Apple’s part. He claims that a “little-birdie” told him the consolidated.db file acts as a cache for your location, and it’s not meant in any way to be used by Apple to track your location history and moves; the file is never sent to Apple’s servers, but is kept locally on your 3G device and on your computer – if you decided to back up an iPhone or iPad using iTunes. Moreover, the location data doesn’t rely on accurate GPS information – instead, it uses antennas’ triangulation, meaning that in most cases data can be miles off your actual location on a specific day.

The big question of course, is why Apple is storing this information. I don’t have a definitive answer, but my little-birdie-informed understanding is that consolidated.db acts as a cache for location data, and that historical data should be getting culled but isn’t, either due to a bug or, more likely, an oversight. I.e. someone wrote the code to cache location data but never wrote code to cull non-recent entries from the cache, so that a database that’s meant to serve as a cache of your recent location data is instead a persistent log of your location history. I’d wager this gets fixed in the next iOS update.

iOS 4.3.2 was released last week, and Apple might push a 4.3.3 software update relatively soon to “improve overall stability” and introduce “bug fixes” – as they usually write in their changelogs for this kind of updates. Apple PR hasn’t issued a statement about the discovery of this location tracking system for iPhones and iPads 3G, but the story has quickly made the rounds of the Internet and ended up on mainstream media as well. If it’s really a bug, or an oversight, a software update should be the easiest solution to the problem.

Sleipnir Browser Comes To The iPad With Gestures, Bookmark Sync

When I originally reviewed Sleipnir, an alternative browser for the iPhone, back in December, I was impressed by how the app managed to innovate in a market – the one of alternatives to Apple’s MobileSafari – that was saturated and full of apps that were just trying to offer the same set of functionalities over and over again – that is, tabs and Dropbox integration and, overall, some UI schemes that were aimed at porting the classic browsing desktop experience to the iPhone. Like Portal, Sleipnir was one of the very few apps that truly wanted to innovate on the platform. Rather than just copying the desktop and trying to squeeze a Mac-like experience into the iPhone’s screen, Sleipnir provided a series of features like touch-based tab management, tab groups and fullscreen mode that showed everyone how it was indeed possible to innovate with a mobile browser. And now Sleipnir wants to do the same on the iPad.

Released last night in the App Store, Sleipnir for iPad looks a lot like the iPhone version but it makes much greater use of multitouch gestures and tabs to offer a unique browsing experience like no other on the tablet. Instead of placing tabs as “panels” under the top app toolbar, Sleipnir for iPad follows the path traced by its iPhone counterpart and visualizes open pages as thumbnail previews at the bottom. The larger screen of the iPad allowed developers to further play around with this concept and implement a larger bar that shows more open websites at once. The refined cache management in version 1.2 also makes it possible to keep more pages open at once without losing your scrolling position and being forced to reload a page – although I’ve noticed after a dozens of tabs running in the background Sleipnir will refresh a page anyway. However, it works as well as Safari on the iPad 2, if not better: I rarely stumbled upon the page reload issue, and when I did Sleipnir refreshed the page in a way that my exact position was maintained. But there’s more: this new version introduces “TouchPaging”, a new feature that allows you to navigate between tabs with a horizontal swipe (think of the iOS 4.3 multitasking gestures, or the “back” animation in Lion’s Safari) and close a single tab by tracing a “L” on screen. I love these gestures, as they make browsing on the iPad so much natural it’s incredible to think Apple didn’t come out with a similar idea on Safari.

Just like on the iPhone, tabs can be organized in “groups” with drag&drop support, and you can close a tab with a vertical swipe on its preview. You can also drag a tab to the trash, and move as many tabs as you want inside a group. Again, the iPad’s bigger screen allows for a more convenient tab management that truly shines on Sleipnir for iPad. Last, bookmark sync: I still don’t like how Sleipnir handles the creation of bookmarks and the assignment of labels, but with a free Sleipnir Pass account the app lets you keep bookmarks in sync across the iPad and iPhone. The lack of bookmark importing features is annoying, but OTA sync across devices is just great.

Sleipnir is available for free on the App Store, and it’s one of the most innovative browsers ever released on iOS. Give it a try. Read more

News.me iPad App Launches To Take On Social Magazines

News.me, a new social reading experience for the iPad developed by technology incubator Betaworks and The New York Times, launched on the App Store a few minutes ago after much anticipation and speculation on whether or not the service could take on well-established “social magazines” like Flipboard and Zite. There’s no doubt the iPad has created a new market for this kind of applications: rather than presenting a series of links pulled from the top Google News or Techmeme, apps like Flipboard aim at showcasing content being shared by your friends on Twitter and Facebook. But while Flipboard simply collects all content shared in your timelines without applying any sort of filter for relevance and popularity, News.me wants to change the rules of tablet-based social reading experiences by offering a “smart” system that, thanks to data provided by popular URL shortener bit.ly, can filter out the most relevant items appearing in your Twitter timeline – and in someone else’s as well.

That’s the key point of News.me, the feature that will need to be tested in the long term to see if the experiment has a chance to survive in this crowded digital and social newsstand. Not only does News.me enable you to see what your friends are sharing (through tweets), it also lets you see what they are reading. And from this standpoint, logging into Twitter within News.me gives the app a whole new meaning when it comes to “Twitter integration.” It’s a huge bet for Betaworks and The New York Times: can the bit.ly-backed algorithm provide an efficient way to distribute personalized news to iPad users? More importantly, is it enough to convince people to pay $0.99 a week, or $34.99 a year? Read more

Verizon: 2.2 Million iPhones Activated In Two Months

Following yesterday’s official AT&T iPhone activations for the first quarter of 2011 (3.6 million units) and Apple’s Q2 financial results (18.65 million iPhones sold), Verizon reported its Q1 2011 earnings results this morning, confirming that the company activated more than 2 million iPhones 4s since February.

As noted by Peter Kafka at MediaMemo, Verizon’s earnings results public PDF document indicates the company activated 2.2 million iPhones in two months – the device went on sale on February 10th, thus granting Verizon only two months of availability during the quarter. Apple didn’t officially disclose Verizon iPhone sales numbers at its earnings call yesterday, however they did say that adding the iPhone to Verizon’s line-up meant begin offering the device to an enormous customer base.

The CDMA iPhone is expected to be released in more countries on different carriers in the next months, but Apple hasn’t confirmed any of these plans yet. Initial speculation on Verizon iPhone sales claimed numbers were “low” and “under Apple’s expectations”, but 2.2 million units activated in 2 months seems to suggest the device has been selling strongly in the quarter.

Why A New iPhone In September Makes Sense

I’ve been thinking about this for a while now, but after seeing Apple’s terrific financial results for the second 2011 quarter it became clear to me: a new iPhone in September makes perfect sense, in spite of all the reports claiming it would be a bad choice for the company to “delay” the release of the next-generation to the Fall skipping the usual June / July timeframe. Of course Apple hasn’t confirmed any of this speculation, but if rumors and reports from well-sourced Apple journalists like Jim Dalrymple are of any indication, it really looks like we’re going to see a new iPhone in September, not this summer. And here’s why I think it’s a good plan. Read more

Apple Q2 2011 Financial Results: $24.67 Billion Revenue, 4.69 Million iPads, 18.65 Million iPhones Sold

Apple has just posted their Q2 2011 financial results. The company posted revenue of $24.67 billion, with 4.69 million iPads sold, 18.65 million iPhones and 3.76 million Macs. Wall Street consensus estimate was EPS of $5.36 and revenue of $23.34B. Mac sales saw a 28% increase over the year-ago quarter, while with 9.02 million iPods sold Apple saw a 17% unit decline. Overall, the company posted quarterly revenue growth of 83% and profit growth of 95%. International sales were 59% for the quarter, with Asia and Pacific regions featuring a 182% increase year over year. The reported iPhone sales were stronger than expected by most analysts, with a 113% increase year over year. iPhone revenues, however, grew faster than sales with a 126% increase [source]. Overall, this was the biggest non-holiday quarter in Apple’s history.

With quarterly revenue growth of 83 percent and profit growth of 95 percent, we’re firing on all cylinders,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We will continue to innovate on all fronts throughout the remainder of the year.

In Q1 2011, the company posted a record revenue of $26.74 billion with 7.33 million iPads sold, 16.24 million iPhones and 4.13 million Macs. In the year-ago quarter, Apple posted revenue of $13.50 billion and net quarterly profit of $3.07 billion. The company sold 2.94 million Macs, 8.75 million iPhones and 10.89 million iPods during the quarter.

Apple will provide a live streaming audio feed of its Q2 2011 financial results conference call at 2:00 PM Pacific, and we’ll update this story with the conference highlights. Read more