Federico Viticci

10779 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

White iPhone 4 Shows Up On AT&T’s Online System

Here we go again. After a brief appearance on Verizon’s website right after the official announcement of the new CDMA iPhone 4, the mythical white iPhone 4 has been spotted on AT&T’s online management system, BGR reports.

It looks like Best Buy isn’t the only retailer with white iPhones popping up in its system. AT&T is now showing two versions of Apple’s unicorn-colored iPhone. The entries appear in AT&T’s Online Account Management system (OLAM), and read as “iPhone 4 – 16GB White” and “iPhone 4 – 32GB White.

Of course, this may just be a mistake or a prank from an AT&T employee – we don’t know what to think about the white iPhone at this point. Still, it keeps showing up. Read more

iPad Retina Display? Maybe With iPad 3…

With the iPad 2 set to come out sometime in April and Apple reportedly about to announce a media event to unveil the new device in February, the Apple rumor mill is in fully-working state. And when it comes to the next-generation iPad, two are the kinds of rumors that blogs and publications are reporting: Retina Display and faster processor. Lately, we have noticed a rapid increase in the presence of “iPad Retina Display” rumors on the Internet. Read more

Woman Tries To Commit Suicide Because She Lost Her iPhone

You can file this in the “just wrong” category we have seen appear from time to time here on MacStories. Mrs. Wong, iPhone 4 owner from Hong Kong, was really happy about her purchase; she was so glad she got an iPhone, in fact, that when she accidentally lost it she went asking her husband to immediately get a new one. Her husband is a bus driver, and the couple has two daughters to think about, too. For an average family, getting two iPhones in the same week might be a little too much.

So her husband said no, and Mrs. Wong went crazy about it. She left home at 6 in the morning, only to try to jump from the 14th floor of the building. All of this because she was upset about the lost iPhone. Luckily, her husband noticed her weird behavior, called the police and went up to the 14th floor to stop her.

Now, I’m not here to judge people, but this is just wrong. Wrong. Committing suicide for an iPhone? For as much as I love Apple device, I would never put my life at risk because I lost one. Also: the free Find My iPhone works great. [iPhoneShine via OrientalDaily]

FolderWatch Monitors and Syncs Folders On Your Mac

Available at $2.99 in the Mac App Store, FolderWatch is an easy-to-use yet powerful utility that can monitor any folder on your Mac and sync it back to a different location. In FolderWatch, you can specify an unlimited amount of “sources” (e.g. folders) that the app will monitor for changes, like new files or folders within them. Once a “destination” is set, FolderWatch will run in the background and make a carbon copy of the source to the other folder, server or external drive you have set.

FolderWatch, indeed, can copy files to any location that can be added to your Mac’s Finder. Any networked drive, local server, FTP location mounted in the Finder can be selected as a destination. Personally, I am sending backups of media and Linkinus chat logs on to an external USB drive connected to the AirPort Extreme that powers my home network. Everything happens automatically, in the background;  you can choose to make these copy sessions persistent on each change in the destination (backup will start as soon as a new or updated file is recognized) or trigger them manually with the “Sync” button.

The app can also skip files through filters you can create / delete when adding a new rule, and delete files in the destination folder that do not exist in the source. This will let you easily achieve some sort of sync between folders on your OS X machine that’s quite handy. It’s not as complex and feature-rich like FileSorter and Hazel, but it all works smoothly and requires  a very few clicks to be set up.

FolderWatch is available at $2.99 here. More screenshots below. Read more

Oh, Satire: An App Store for App Stores

What’s better than Apple’s App Store with its 350,000 apps available for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch? An App Store to download other App Stores. Chris Genetti at Draconum has imagined the following scenario: an App Store for iOS and OS X that lets you download, manage and update a variety of stores like the App Store itself, the Android market and the Kindle store.

The problem is, he may actually be right. We’re surrounded by app stores. Anyway, pretty funny.

This Notification System Would Look Good on iOS 5 [Mockup]

One of the key areas users would like Apple to focus on for iOS 5 is the notification system. Currently, notifications on iOS are far from useful and unobtrusive: they get in the way too much, there’s no way to access a log of past notifications, if you’re playing a game and quickly dismiss a notification’s alert because you’re busy / concentrated, there’s no way to get that notification back. Many says notifications are the less Apple-like feature in iOS.

In the past, we have covered several alternative solutions to improve iOS’ notification system, like Notified. All these tweaks are available for jailbreakers in Cydia, and require a bit of manual hacking and configuration. The following mockup, realized by Youtube user hustn, shows a few ideas that we think might be a good fit for the next major update of iOS. Notifications that don’t get in the way but appear in a bar at the top, even multiple ones; possibility to tweak the settings with quiet times and display order; an additional section above the multitasking tray that shows the most recent notifications from all apps. It looks pretty good and interesting. As the creator explains:

This is a mockup of my current side project of designing an improved iPhone notification system. Unlike other attempts at improving the iPhone’s notification system, my approach is to use design direction from the current iPhone UI to create a seamless interface for the user.

This is purely theoretical. There is no code behind this; I’ve mocked this all up in Flash and Photoshop.

What do you think? The system looks a bit like the notifications seen in Palm’s webOS, and undoubtedly borrowing a few ideas from Palm wouldn’t be so bad for Apple. Especially considering that former Palm Senior UI Designer Rich Dellinger now works at Cupertino. [via Reddit]
Read more

New Cydia Feature: Theme Center

In his attempt to make Cydia faster, richer and truly competitive feature-wise with Apple’s own App Store, Jay Freeman, a.k.a. saurik, added a new feature to the alternative store a few hours ago: Theme Center. It was only three days ago that Freeman implemented a new account management system that allows users to easily check on previously installed packages; now, thanks to the new database / index put in place by saurik called “Whole Package Index”, users will be able to browse featured themes optimized for Retina and Non-Retina iOS devices.

The selection of themes right now is limited to top-selling Cydia themes and the ones picked by staff of MacCiti and ModMyi. Soon, users will have the option to pick the best themes in Cydia and vote them to have them featured in Theme Center.

We think Cydia keeps getting better on every release and update, and saurik’s support is exceptional. Apple should took a few elements from the Cydia Store and port them to the App Store.

Game Center Achievements…For A Camera App

Achievements are that sort of thing that keeps gamers going even when frustration and disappointment take over the initial excitement for a new game. You beat the game, you can’t have any more quests, but you want all the trophies / achievements. Many friends of mine do this on their PS3 and Xbox 360 – I’ve never been a fan of achievements, personally. Clearly I must be an exception, as even Apple itself implemented the functionality in Game Center. Not to mention other gaming networks for iOS like OpenFeint and Plus+, which have been offering achievements and leaderboards for quite some time now. Read more

Toggle Any Twitter Client On Your Mac

Toggle Twitter is a simple and useful script created by Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater Software which can toggle and make visible most any Twitter client for OS X. Well, at least it comes with built-in support for the most popular ones. The concept behind the script goes like this: we try a lot of Twitter clients every week, or month. Many of us even use multiple clients throughout the day. The problem is, not every client has support for a general hotkey to toggle the visibility of the app.

So if you’re using Twitterrific or Twitter for Mac and you assigned the same keyboard shortcut to both the apps to show them when active, you’d be disappointed to find that other Twitter clients don’t allow you to assign a hotkey. This script comes with a list of popular Twitter apps, but you can add your favorite ones manually with a bit of AppleScript Editor. The ones supported “out of the box” are:  Twitter, Tweetie, Kiwi, Ostrich, Twitterrific, Hibari and YoruFukurou. Read more