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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@viticci.macstories.net
viticci@macstories.net

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The OS Doesn’t Matter→

The OS Doesn’t Matter

For the developer, what we now call the OS must supply ever-growing expressive power—think a fife versus a twelve-keyboard organ. To wield that expressive power, the programmer needs software tools. The industry uses acronyms such as API (Application Programming Interface), IDE (Integrated Development Environment) or phrases such as Application Frameworks. They define the rules and conventions—which ideas are allowed and how to express them—and the software tools that programmers need to develop an application.

This is today’s OS. User experience. Development tools.

The fact that Apple provides one of the best development suites says a lot.

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Sparrow: New Email Client for Mac That’s Just Like Tweetie

I’ve been a Mail.app user for a long time, but a few weeks ago I decided to move my primary work mail account to Gmail under Google Apps. I love Gmail’s web UI, and even though I’m also a huge Mailplane fan I had to keep all my other Gmail / Google Apps-based accounts in Mail.app, mainly for the better integration with Applescripts, Automator workflows and plugins. Mail.app works fine, but it’s not revolutionary, breathtaking at the way it allows you to interact with messages or geared towards people who need to play with multiple accounts on a daily basis. As a matter of fact, if you put too many accounts in Apple Mail and activate too many plugins - it will explode. But then again, that’s not my main concern.

I’ve been wondering whether it’d be possible to developer a better Mail client for Mac. The Letters.app project seems to be dead or something, and I haven’t heard of other devs finding their way through IMAP and Cocoa. Not until this morning, when I got an email about - yes - an entirely new email application specifically built with Mac users in mind.

Meet Sparrow. Read more

Desktop Connect for iPad, Reviewed

Since the iPadʼs announcement I have a feeling that there where quite a few people who planned on using it as a replacement for a laptop or netbook computer. I certainly bought into that school of thought. Say what you will about it, the iPad is an extremely powerful computing device, however lacking it may be in a few areas. One of these areas is the lack of an open filesystem. Iʼd love to be able to use my iPad to carry around all of my homework files to and from school, without having to store them all in Pageʼs file system via iTunes.

The workaround to this, is a VNC or other screensharing app. Iʼve been using Anteceaʼs Desktop Connect since its release last April, and it rocks. I havenʼt tried out iTeleport yet, but even so just given that Desktop Connect costs $10 less than iTeleport Iʼd consider it an awesome deal. (Itʼs $14.99 in the App Store) Read more

Control Your Mac From iOS Using Dropbox And Applescript→

Control Your Mac From iOS Using Dropbox And Applescript

So in the past few weeks a bunch of text editing apps for iOS have been released that use Dropbox to sync with your desktop computer. I’ve been really liking Plaintext, and was wondering what I could use it for besides just plain writing text…

And then I remembered Folder Actions, which are an OS X feature that lets you set an applescript to run whenever a file is added to a folder (or deleted).

All you need is remember some Applescripts.

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1TapAlarm: Easy Reminder Notifications for iPhone

Two weeks ago I installed a new app on my iPhone called “Due” which allows me to easily set up reminders for any action I don’t want to dump into my GTD system (powered by OmniFocus), yet I need to be reminded of. Due for iPhone is very simple, and it lets you enter a title for the “task”, a due time and play around with some straightforward settings.

1TapAlarm by ShinyFrog is an even simpler app you can use to setup quick timers on your iPhone. Plus, it’s free in the App Store. Read more