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

Mac App Store: 1 Million Apps Downloaded on Day One

This morning Apple announced that more than 1 million apps were downloaded from the Mac App Store on Day One. The Mac App Store was launched yesterday with around 1,000 apps available for OS X computers. According to Steve Jobs, “Developers have done a great job bringing apps to the store and users are loving how easy and fun the Mac App Store is”. The Mac App Store indeed offers an easy and fun purchase experience, although it’s pretty clear that some apps don’t exactly follow Apple’s own interface guidelines or aren’t exactly “best of the breed” of Mac software.

The Mac App Store undoubtedly changes the landscape of independent development for the Mac and software installation on OS X. One million downloads in 24 hours isn’t too bad, and we’ll see how these stats will pan out in the next weeks.

Read more

Mac App Store Review: Contacts Cleaner

Developed by Spanning Sync and available in the Mac App Store at $4.99, Contacts Cleaner is a simple utility aimed at fixing the little problems that can slowly take over your state-of-the-art Address Book organization. I’m talking about unrecognized Unicode characters (because admit it, you tried to paste weird symbols next to your boss’ phone number), missing info and extra spaces between names that shouldn’t be there. Contacts Cleaner can fix these issues thanks to a minimal and simple interface that makes it easy to go through the most scary list of broken contacts. Read more

Mac App Store: Easy Installation of Apps On All Your Macs. Goodbye, DMG.

With the Mac App Store, as promised by Apple, you can buy apps once and install everywhere. As long as you make sure all the computers you’re willing to install apps on are your personal Macs (and you’re not trying to pirate apps that don’t come with proper receipt validation), you can purchase apps on your first Mac, and then pass them along to as many machines as you want. From a user perspective, this is just great – although it sort of kills the concept of “family licenses” we were used to in pre-App Store days. Read more

CoverSutra 2.5 Released, Exclusive to Mac App Store

A major new version of popular music controller CoverSutra by Sophiestication was released today, and it’s available exclusively on the Mac App Store at $4.99. For those who are not familiar with the app (which we last reviewed here in January 2009), CoverSutra is a desktop controller for music coming from iTunes. Unlike Ecoute, which is more like a lightweight music player, CoverSutra only display songs information by plugging directly into Apple’s software.

CoverSutra, however, doesn’t only come with a neat desktop widget that displays the artwork for the album that’s playing. Although that option got even bigger with the latest 2.5 update (it now supports artworks up to 256px on the desktop), what’s cool about the app is that you can assign keyboard shortcuts to almost any function supported by CoverSutra. You can choose to invoke a heads-up display window with music control through a hotkey, or assign multiple shortcuts to dozens of commands like volume up and down, next track, search and so forth. Search, for instance, happens in a popup coming down from CoverSutra’s menubar icon; you can search for any song, album or artist you want and navigate with the keyboard through the results to start playing.

The Mac App Store 2.5 also includes a new keyboard bezel display style, and an option to let the app automatically start and quit with iTunes. Now this is nice, as it’s an iTunes controller and it depends on it. CoverSutra 2.5 is available as Mac App Store-only here.

Mac App Store Review: RemoteSnap

RemoteSnap is the first app I downloaded from the Mac App Store as I managed to go past the “Error 100” the store was returning minutes after its launch. RemoteSnap has one and only purpose: it acts a server on your Mac capable of receiving photos from your iPhone and iPod touch wirelessly, as you take them. RemoteSnap for Mac is available for free here.

To use the Mac app, though, you’ll need to download the iOS counterpart. RemoteSnap for iOS is available in the App Store for free or at $0.99. The free version will apply a watermark to your photos. Once you download and run the app on your Mac (you just have to click on the icon that will jump from the Mac App Store to your dock), start the app on your iPhone and wait as it connects to the Mac’s server. It should take less than 2 seconds. After that, you’ll see a camera interface saying “connected to computer name” in the upper left corner. Once you’re connected and you’ve chosen the destination folder for photos on your computer, you can start snapping pictures. Within seconds, they’ll be transferred onto your Mac via WiFi. No passwords or manual copy needed.

RemoteSnap is that kind of simple utility that we’re sure we’ll do very well in the Mac App Store. It’s not an app for the most sophisticated photographers, but it can come in handy for when you need some pictures to quickly end up on your Mac. Go download RemoteSnap on the Mac App Store here.

Mac App Store Impressions: Elegant, Some Apps Are Expensive, Others Suck

Today’s a pretty hectic day. Apple officially launched the Mac App Store as part of OS X 10.6.6 a few hours ago and mostly everyone in the Mac community is now playing around with the new Store, busy installing paid and free apps, trying to find what’s already good and what could have been done a lot better.

After a few purchases, free downloads and some minutes spent to get used to the new UI brought by the Mac App Store, we have some first impressions to share. Read more

Twitter for Mac Review: Love It, Hate It, Tweet It

At some point in the past months, I thought I would never had the chance to write this review. But it’s happening. Twitter for Mac, what you expected to be called Tweetie 2.0 before Atebits became part of Twitter, is now live in the Mac App Store. It’s available for free here.

Like I said, months ago an idea started to grow on me: Tweetie 2.0 for Mac, the way I saw it back then, was never going to happen. Kaput. Vaporware. Twitter killed it, and with it – Loren Brichter’s enthusiasm and passion and willingness to provide millions of Mac users out there the sequel to what I think it’s still one of the finest Twitter clients ever created for the platform. And it’s not that the term “sequel” doesn’t apply really well to this whole saga: Twitter acquired Atebits but Loren had promised that MacHeist customers would get early access to Tweetie 2; Tweetie for iPhone was rebranded; the guy even started making promises and interviews about an app that “was coming”. Just like in the best stories of sequels that seem to never happen, people began to lose faith in Brichter, Twitter and Tweetie 2.0. They moved on. Read more

Apple Releases Remote Desktop In The Mac App Store and 3.4 Update

Earlier today, Apple released its VNC app / remote administration and assistance software Apple Remote Desktop in the Mac App Store. The app is available here at $79.99 (Mac App Store link) and, together with Aperture, it’s one of the “pro apps” that Apple decided to feature for the Mac App Store grand opening.The app, specifically tailored for network admins and users who need to manage a series of OS X machines in a local network, offers a huge feature set with functionalities such as software distribution, task server for package installations, UNIX shell scripts execution on clients and remote Automator tasks.

Today Apple also released an update to Remote Desktop, which reaches version 3.4 and it’s the same version that’s being sold in the Mac App Store. There’s no real changelog for this update just yet, except that Apple marks it as “recommended” for all Apple Remote Desktop users and addresses compatibility issues. More information are available here.

You can buy Apple Remote Desktop in the Mac App Store here.

How To Fix Mac App Store “Error 100”

The Mac App Store went live less than an hour ago and as I installed the OS X 10.6.6 update required to use the new Store, I rebooted my computer and logged in the Mac App Store using my Apple ID. As I tried to download a free app, the Mac App Store returned Error 100, saying:

We could not complete your App Store request. An unknown error occurred.

We’re also getting several reports from users still unable to download apps from the Mac App Store because of this error. The cause seems to be lying in the fact that in the first minutes the Mac App Store went live and Apple let users log in with Apple IDs, they didn’t include the updated Terms and Conditions to accept before start using the Store. Thus many users, including me, logged in without accepting the Terms and were unable to download apps because they were stuck in some sort of “limbo”.

Here’s how you can fix it:

  • Sign out from the Mac App Store. You can do it by accessing the “Quick Links” section in the Mac App Store homepage and clicking on “Account”. Sign out.

  • Quit the Mac App Store app.

  • Log out from your computer; log in again.

  • Open the Mac App Store, sign in with your Apple ID, try to download a free app and accept the Terms and Conditions when asked. After that, the download should start.

  • If a logout doesn’t fix the issue, restart your Mac instead. We’re hearing that a reboot fixed the problem for many users.

If you’re still experiencing the issue, please let us know in the comments.