Federico Viticci

10878 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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UberTwitter For iPhone Reminds Us Why We Didn’t Pick A BlackBerry In The First Place

Every day, 10 million tweets are sent using UberTwitter for BlackBerry handsets. Enterprise folks tweet with it (but please remind me why the business dudes tweet, I think I’m missing something here), celebrities tweet with it, the developers were so happy with the popularity of UberTwitter for BlackBerry that they decided to port it to the iPhone.

Now, I’m not usually huge on app portings from one platform to another. I don’t like developers who are successful on the iPhone and convert an app to Android without considering Android’s nature, and I had the same feeling when I heard of UberTwitter for iPhone this morning.

Indeed my feeling was correct. The app is simply ugly, and doesn’t feel right on the iPhone. It tries to be an iPhone app, but I stopped caring the moment I saw floating controls above a web view and a split view badly squeezed on the iPhone’s screen. It feels wrong most of the times.

UberTwitter for iPhone might be huge brand-wise, but it’s not really a great app at all. If you feel like trying something new this morning though, or you simply want to be reminded why you switched from BlackBerry last year, the app is available here. Press release embedded below. Read more

The Coolest Thing You’ll See Today: iPhone Seen Through Oil & Water

We have seen many videos about the iPhone screen in the past: some of them focused on the magic of the Retina Display, some of them aimed at capturing pixels on our old 3GS. The same pixels we didn’t think were so important before we got our hands on the iPhone 4.

Today’s video is about the iPhone’s screen, as seen through a Canon EOS 5D looking down a piece of glass with oil & water on it. Jesse Zanzinger, the photographer who realized the video, set the maximum level of iPhone brightness, placed a piece a glass with oil and water above the iPhone and looked down with his camera to capture both science’s best enemies and the screen in a single shoot.

The result is kind of surprising. Check it out below, but don’t this at home kids. I don’t want oil to end up all over your iPhones. [Vimeo] Read more

Apple-1 Goes For $213k In Christie’s Auction→

Apple-1 Goes For $213k In Christie’s Auction

Two hundred Apple-1 computers are estimated to have been created and sold for $666.66 before Apple Computer Inc. was founded in 1977. Once the Apple II, the company’s first official product, was released, many of the Apple-1 models were reclaimed as trade-ins. Only about 50 are still known to exist, many of them indexed by hardware developer Mike Willegal.

Of those 200 machines, Christie’s Apple-1 is No. 82. This same Apple-1 is thought to be the same one that was sold on eBay in November 2009 by a user named “apple1sale” to “julescw72”. At the time, it sold for a winning bid of $50,000.

Remember the original Apple-1 that was up for auction at Christie’s? Someone bought it for almost $220,000.

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Due 1.2 Alerts You It’s The Best Reminder App for iPhone

Back in September I reviewed Due, an interesting new app to quickly create reminders and set up timers on your iPhone. The first version of the app featured a cool UI and a good set of functionalities, allowing you to easily switch between the reminder and timer window. Most of all, the best thing about Due was that it looked great and enabled you to just forget about the app once reminders were set.

It’s really simple: once you enter a new item you can choose a due date & time, but there are some handy shortcuts in the same screen. If you find yourself constantly using some reminders as countdowns, you can create a timer. That’s it. The interface is clean and polished, and the app doesn’t even need an internet connection to work as it’s based on iOS 4′s local notification system.

The new 1.2 version, which was approved yesterday and I have been beta testing for a while, adds terrific new features to an already great package. If you tap on a reminder in the main screen, for instance, you’ll be presented a bar containing shortcuts to turn snooze on and off, set the reminder as repeating, reschedule the whole thing to 10 minutes, 1 hour or 1 day later. Useful. The developer added reminder management (something many fans hoped they would not, in order to keep the app simple) but by stuffing it in a bar you’ll only see after a tap, they didn’t clutter anything. It feels good.

Due for iPhone is available at $2.99 in the App Store. Check out the huge changelog with all the new features and more screenshots below. Read more

New York Times Uses Hipstamatic Photos For Front Page Story→

New York Times Uses Hipstamatic Photos For Front Page Story

When NYT photog Damon Winter went to northern Afghanistan to catalog the efforts of the First Battalion, 87th Infantry of the 10th Mountain Division, he took all the fancy camera equipment you would expect. He’d shoot video of firefights with a Canon EOS 5D Mark II, sure. But he also grabbed still photos using Hipstamatic, an app that lets you choose among a huge selection of filters.

Front page photo here. Impressive.

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iOS 4.2.1 RAM Usage Visualized

iOS 4.2 is a major new update for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad – built on the strong foundation of iOS 4 – which introduces many new features, fixes and overall performance improvements. If you ever wondered how much iOS 4.2 improved the experience from a memory usage standpoint, take a look at the graph below, compiled by the guys over at iPadevice.

The graph doesn’t come with a provided scale, but it gives you a quick idea of the performance improvements Apple focused on for the release of iOS 4.2 for iPad.

SBSettings Now iOS 4.2.1-Ready | Cydia

Good news keep coming for early iOS 4.2.1 jailbreakers: if you installed Cydia on your newly updated device this morning using redsn0w, you might want to fire up Cydia again and check for updates. SBSettings, the popular utility to access iPhone and iPad functionalities such as respring, reboot and a variety of shortcuts, is now fully compatible with iOS 4.2.1.

The new 3.2.1 update fixes a statusbar free memory issue, the date display on iOS 4.2.1 and permissions on SBSettings data storage folder. It’s available now in Cydia.

Beatles In iTunes: 2 Million Songs Sold, 450,000 Album Downloads

Unless you’ve been living in a yellow submarine for the past three weeks, I guess you heard about the Beatles coming to iTunes. In fact, Apple thought the day the Beatles’ library was released in iTunes would be a day we’ll remember for the rest of our lives.

Life-changing event or not, the Beatles in iTunes have sold over 2 million songs so far and generated 450,000 album downloads, Billboard reports.

In US the best-selling album was Abbey Road and best-selling song was Here Comes the Sun.

Backed by a strong advertising campaign which also happens to promote iTunes, it looks like there was room for The Beatles in people’s music libraries, after all. One could argue whether 2 million songs sold with all that campaign are much or not, we’re just going to wait for Billboard to provide additional numbers and information before judging.