Federico Viticci

10876 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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Super Mega Worm Goes Free To Celebrate Verizon iPhone, Mac App Store Release

Super Mega Worm! The game that lets you control the Death Worm Wojira to save the Earth from extinction. The iOS game packed with retro graphics and awesome pixel art. One of the most successful iPhone and iPad games to date thanks to its humour and Game Center support. Well, to celebrate the release of the Verizon iPhone and the availability of the app in the Mac App Store, Super Mega Worm for iOS (universal for iPhone and iPad) has gone free. Free, as in “free for a limited time before it goes up again”.

Go download it here.

Barclays: 33 Million iPads This Year, Apple “Far Ahead” Of Its Competition In Enterprise

In spite of Microsoft’s attempts to convince the enterprise folks that the iPad is inadequate, iOS devices, and especially the iPad, are doing well in the enterprise market segment. Apparently, they’re doing so well that RIM itself has fallen behind and SAP rolled out 1,000 iPads to its employees a few months ago. The recent additions in iOS 4 and 4.2 for business users surely helped along the way in getting iPhones and iPads into offices and large companies. But the iPad, thanks to its larger screen and notebook-like features, is set to produce even bigger results in 2011.

According to Barclays Capital analyst Ben Reitzes, the iPad is “far ahead” of competitors in the tablet market; without setting up a salesforce, Apple is “listening to enterprise customers”. More and more corporate users are quickly shifting to the iOS environment and, most of all, they are bringing these devices to work. The popularity of the App Store and the fact that thousands of applications are available and continually updated in the Business category helps these users install work-related software on their devices, which are also used for personal purposes. As Reitzes notes, this is “the consumerization of IT”. And when the App Store doesn’t provide the right tools to deploy applications on a large scale, wireless app distribution introduced in iOS 4.2 allows enterprises to host and wirelessly distribute their own in-house apps, both on WiFi and 3G.

Last, Reitzes believes 47 million tablets will be sold in 2011, including 33.7 million  iPads. Similar numbers were shared by analysts Wolf and Fidacaro earlier this week.

Bejeweled 3 for iPhone and iPad Coming, Eventually

If you’re a loyal Bejeweled fan (dare we say “addicted”), then you must be happy to know that, eventually, Bejeweled 3 will “probably” come to the iPhone and iPad. Why the “eventually” and “probably”? The game, developed by PopCap Games, was released as a digital download for Windows and Mac last December and, especially on the Mac side of things, several gamers decided to put the download on hold, waiting for a mobile iOS counterpart. Good news is, hope isn’t lost as PopCap Games’ Garth Chouteau hints at the porting in a recent interview with Pocketful of Megabytes, which you can read here.

When asked about an iOS version, Chouteau says:

As mentioned above, we’re traditionally somewhat slow to adapt our games to other platforms after launching them on PC/Mac… Bejeweled 3 for iPhone/iPad is probably something we’ll do…eventually…!

Bejeweled 3 for iOS, if priced correctly and made universal in the App Store, would undoubtedly jump the charts in a matter of a few days. The game is popular, people want to play, PopCap wants as many downloads as possible – sounds like a plan, right? Yes, but we have to wait. Eventually, it will come. Hopefully sooner than later. [via TUAW]

GoodReader for iPad Update: Remote Sync, Better Download Management

GoodReader, one of the most popular file & download managers / PDF reader apps for iPad, was updated two days ago to version 3.3, which adds a number of notable improvements and new features such as synchronization with remote services. GoodReader for iPad, in fact, can now sync files and folders with Dropbox, SugarSync (support for this service was added in this version) and any WebDAV or FTP server. Users can select which files and folders to sync, select different files to be synced with specific services and also set options to resolve sync conflicts such as priority for local files and duplicates.

Download management has been improved as well. SugarSync support aside, you can now lock the in-app web browser with a passcode and download entire folders from a server, not just individual files. Multiple downloads can happen at once, and you can set a download folder other than “My Documents”. On top of that, download of files can now run in the background for “several minutes” – we assume is the usual 10 minutes Apple allows developers to implement for task completion.

GoodReader for iPad is available at $2.99 in the App Store. Check out the full 3.3 changelog below. Read more

iOS Notifications: No More, No Less

With today’s rumors about Apple considering the purchase of a third-party developer to improve the notification system of iOS, I thought I should explain why, in my opinion, Apple really needs to focus on this, developer buyout or not. The problem: iOS notifications get in the way, interrupt one’s workflow or media consumption and once they’re gone, they’re gone. In my usual setup, these are the apps that send me notifications: Twitter (replies from users I follow, DMs), Messages, Facebook, Calendar, Skype / IM, Appshopper. I think most of these apps are used by several iPhone and iPad owners. Read more

Apple Launches First Mac App Store Section: “Personal Projects”

It’s Friday, which means Apple has refreshed the iOS and Mac App Store homepages to include new featured apps and fancy graphics to showcase products released this week. With today’s refresh, Apple has also launched the first Mac App Store section: Personal Projects, available here, aggregates apps to make your Mac “a creative hub” for professionals who want to organize their projects and ideas at home. It’s got apps for musicians, designers, photographers and video editors.

With the iOS App Store, Apple inaugurated this weekly trend of launching new sections to collect apps for a specific audience. We think the idea is very cool, but we would like to have a unified way to access all these sections Apple created in the past. Perhaps the Mac App Store will fix this.

Is Apple Buying A Third-Party App To Fix iOS Notifications?

Most iOS users agree that notifications on iPhones, iPod touches and iPads are nothing compared to what Google has implemented in Android, or what HP showed at the webOS event a few days ago. Personally, from what I’ve seen so far, I believe the notification system demoed on the HP TouchPad is the most intriguing one, with messages staying out of the way in the top menubar but still accessible with a single tap that opens a popup menu.

Last year, it was rumored that Apple might improve iOS notifications after hiring Rich Dellinger, creator of the webOS notification system. It didn’t happen with iOS 4 and 4.2 before that, but according to Cult of Mac Apple is now seeking to buy a “smaller” third-party developer to entirely rebuild iOS notifications. According to Cult of Mac, who cites a source that asked to remain anonymous, the smaller company already has an iPhone app in the Store.

Our source, who asked to remain anonymous, didn’t know the identity of the company, except it already has an iPhone app in the App Store.

One candidate is Boxcar, a free app from Appremix that enables push notifications for Twitter, Facebook, and email. Boxcar’s system has been highly praised, especially the new iPad version.

There’s no doubt that Boxcar offers an advanced and easy way to stay on top of updates coming from social networks, email and websites; Boxcar currently has a universal app in the App Store but the service also works on the web. The app of course doesn’t deploy its own notification system on top of iOS, but it aggregates notifications inside a single UI that’s easy to navigate and manage. I can see Apple wanting to build something like this in iOS 5, although they would still need to find a way to get rid (and thus redesign) the annoying alert boxes and unread badges that come with iOS now. Apple might as well ditch popup alerts altogether and take an approach similar to HP, aggregating everything into a central notification app as well.

It will be interesting to see what iOS 5 will bring to the table with notifications and social connections; Boxcar can be a great fit for Apple.

Space Gremlin Is A Simple App To Free Up Space On Your Mac

I stumbled upon Space Gremlin for Mac today when browsing new releases and top paid categories in the Mac App Store. Not as sexy and shiny as Daisy Disk, Space Gremlin can scan any drive connected to your Mac (external, internal Mac HD, network drive through AirPort Extreme station) and provide an easy solution to visualize files that are eating space on your computer.

Space Gremlin doesn’t allow you to delete files and folders in-app like Daisy Disk does with the recent 2.0 update, however it comes with a more standard grid view that reminds me of the popular cleaning tool WinDirStat for Windows. From this grid view (scan took a few seconds on my 120 GB SSD), you can select folders to reveal them in Finder, navigate to deeper levels, zoom back and hide free space / hidden files. What’s cool is that you can also add specific folders (like system ones) to an ignore list because you know they’re there and you can’t delete them. You can access and modify the ignore list at any time from the toolbar, which also happens to have buttons to refresh folders and perform a new scan. I really, really appreciate the fact that, together with my FireWire drive, the app also recognized the USB one attached to my AirPort extreme and shared on my local network. From the “begin a new scan” window, you also have shortcuts to popular Places like the Desktop, Documents and Applications folders.

Space Gremlin doesn’t have the most beautiful interface you’ve ever seen, but gets the job done. I would like to see the possibility to delete files within the app in a future update, and smoother animations when switching between folders in the filesystems. Overall, Space Gremlin is a well-realized utility that you can get at $3.99 in the Mac App Store.

Shocking Study Reveals: iPad Doesn’t Make You Attractive

Dear iPad owners, according to a recent study by Retrevo Gadgetology gadgets don’t make you attractive to the opposite sex. Most specifically, the iPad doesn’t make you any sexier. “How is that even possible?”, you may ask. Well it turns out, men and women surveyed by Retrevo Gadgetology think reading books, carrying a cool phone or laptop will make you more interesting and worth consideration. We can hear you: iBooks and the Kindle app are the future and there’s no way you’re going back to paper. Still, iPad owners and geeks alike: the tablet won’t get you another date. Perhaps a new MacBook Air will. It’s so thin, after all.

But hey, we’re pretty sure it’s still better to just use the iPad than carry it around like this. Because that would make you less masculine. [via TUAW]