Federico Viticci

10781 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

That “Official” Apple Twitter Account? Suspended.

I guess Apple cares about Twitter, after all. Steve Jobs may be out of the tweeting game, but Phil Schiller seems to be enjoying the fact that since he went public (and verified) with his Twitter account he can reply to users and fans, troubleshoot and even advise against jailbreaking. He also posted his personal email address on Twitter and got spam in his inbox. Nice.

VP of iOS Scott Forstall hasn’t tweeted yet, but we’re ready to bet he will start posting messages and Instagram pictures pretty soon. Read more

aTV Flash Available: Supercharge Your Apple TV Now

aTV Flash, the first alternative browser and multimedia center for the new Apple TV, is out and available for purchase. We have covered aTV Flash in the past week, and we saw the app it’s capable of bringing several new features to the 2nd gen Apple TV, such as HTML5 playback via a custom browser or weather information.

The first public version of the app is available for $19.95 during the beta (or pre-order) phase here. Read more

360 Panorama: Simple Real-Time Panoramic Photos for iPhone

One of the apps I was really looking forward to just showed up in the App Store: Occipital’s 360 Panorama 3.0 for iPhone has been released, and it rocks. This app allows you to take panoramic photos using your iPhone or iPod Touch camera, but unlike many other similar apps available, 360 Panorama doesn’t force you to take multiple shots, stop, take another shot, stop again and then merge all the photos you took.

Occipital’s app does all that in the background and adds an Augmented Reality layer to the iPhone’s camera, meaning that you’ll see a 360° grid on screen and you’ll just have to slowly move the camera around you to build your panorama. It’s almost magical. Read more

I Finally Closed My Google Reader Tab. Reeder for Mac Is That Good.

RSS readers for Mac have been ignored for too long. After an enormous, and maybe initially unexpected, success on the iPhone and iPad, developer Silvio Rizzi set out to create the best new desktop RSS reader. A very simple goal. Perhaps the most difficult to accomplish.

See, they say RSS is dead. Some claim saying “something is dead” is dead. Truth is, Twitter users, Instapaper lovers and Foursquare dwellers don’t know what “dead” means anymore. Especially when it comes down to apps and services, everything can be dead or excellent in a matter of a few weeks. Just take a look at Instragram’s numbers. RSS isn’t for my father or my average non-tech savvy friends, but it definitely isn’t dead. It was just looking for a new desktop house to spend his retirement days in.

Here comes Reeder for Mac to redefine the rules, conventions, UI decisions and navigation schemes of RSS on the desktop.  Read more

John Carmack On iOS Performances→

John Carmack On iOS Performances

From Ars Technica’s interview with John Carmack:

Whether the iOS devices will reach that same level of performance before the next console generation ships is quite an interesting question. There are some very different designs for power consumption considerations that go into their hardware design, and cranking things up to give that level of power but gets burning hot in your hands and uses up the battery in 30 minutes is absolutely possible with the form factor right now, but it’s probably not the right decision from the standpoint of what the device really is and is supposed to be. But even at the same power draw, they’re going to be doubling and doubling again the performance level.

In the not-too-distant future, we’re going to be seeing multicore on mobiles, and I’m very interested in when the transition to 64-bit addresses is going to come in the mobile space.

If there’s one thing that’s holding developers from creating full-featured game experiences on iOS, that would be battery life.

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The MacBook Tablet Shows Up, Again

According to the most loyal Apple fan, two are the “dream products” Apple has in store: the iMac Touch and the MacBook Tablet. While we don’t know whether such machines would make for great innovations or terrible hybrids, the loyal Apple geek surely can dream. And it’s not that patents Apple is granted do anything to convince him that these products aren’t real.

As noted by Patently Apple, the much rumored and long-awaited MacBook Tablet showed up again in a patent published a few days ago. It’s a convertible MacBook / iPad-like device with a touchscreen and a physical keyboard, something that Steve Jobs could really describe as a MacBook hooking up to an iPad. Other patents Apple was granted include one for multi-touch scrolling behavior and the iPad’s virtual keyboard.

Dell is getting ahead of Apple in the convertible notebook market with its latest Inspirion Duo hybrid, and we’re not sure whether Apple will actually ship something like a MacBook Tablet in the next few years. It sounds cool thinking about some sort of MacBook Air with a touch screen, but, as usual, Apple patents are something the loyal Apple fan shouldn’t rely on.

Spaced: Beautiful App With The Latest News From Space

NASA is holding a press conference tomorrow “to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life”, and what better way to check on the coverage of the conference than Spaced app for iPhone and iPad?

I found this app in the App Store this morning while I was looking for my daily software fix. I’ve always been interested in reading space-related material, but I’ve never really subscribed to a set of sources with my RSS reader or bought magazines for that matter. I just followed a bunch of people who regularly tweet that kind of news and I don’t mind giving Reddit’s space section a read every two days or so. Read more

Adobe Launches Flash 10.2 Beta

Are you one of those who recently uninstalled Flash from your computer? I did, mainly because I use Chrome – which comes with its own instance of Flash. If you’ve really uninstalled Flash though, you might want to take a look at Adobe’s latest beta release of the popular plugin.

Version 10.2 beta comes with initial support for Stage Video, a new API Adobe demoed a few weeks ago that is aimed at reducing processor usage by relying on the GPU instead. While hardware acceleration had been deployed in the previous versions of Flash, Stage Video offloads all video tasks to the GPU reducing the CPU load by up to 85%.

Flash 10.2 beta also improves text rendering and support for dual monitors. It’s available for download here, press release embedded below. There are a lot of fixes in this new release as well, so make sure to hit the Adobe source link for a full rundown of what’s new. [TUAW via Adobe] Read more