Federico Viticci

Federico Viticci Coded a Shortcut to Visualize Your Most Listened to Apple Music Songs, Artists, and Genres of the Year →

January 9, 2019 · 14:28

Federico Viticci, on MacStories:

Apple Music Wrapped generates a personalized music report that, by default, collects your 100 most-played songs added to your library in any given year since Apple Music was launched in 2015, sorting them from largest to smallest play count. The shortcut takes less than 30 seconds to run and the final report is opened in Safari as a custom webpage.

It works perfectly. Turns out I have listened to a lot of film music in 2018. You can find my playlist here (88 songs, 5h45m).

Fedrico Viticci’s First 48 Hours With the New 12.9-inch iPad Pro →

November 13, 2018 · 07:05

Federico Viticci, on MacStories:

In practice, I find the iPad Pro’s new design appealing for a couple of reasons. Visually, it’s striking. Whether I’m holding the iPad Pro and using the multitouch keyboard or typing at a desk with the Smart Keyboard Folio, all I can see is a screen that elegantly reaches the corners of its enclosure and embraces them. It’s beautiful, and a testament to Apple’s terrific work on Liquid Retina displays. Again, compared to older iPads it instantly feels like the future, available today. The new iPad Pro elicits the same feeling of last year’s switch from the iPhone 7 to the iPhone X, albeit at a much bigger scale.

Like the iPhone 4 (Retina) and later the iPhone X (“all-screen”) were the two major stepping-stones to the future, the 2018 iPad Pros’ design make it feel like a completely new visual experience — a first since the original iPad from 2010. Realistically, nothing much has changed, but it feels like we have the future in our hands.

From an ergonomic standpoint, I also believe the new design makes it easier to hold the 12.9″ iPad Pro in both landscape and portrait; particularly for portrait orientation, I find typing with my thumbs on the software keyboard sort of possible again, whereas the old design with the thicker bezels on each side often resulted in giving up thumb-typing on the large iPad after a few minutes.

Federico states that thumb-typing is “sort of possible”, which makes me glad I went for the 11-inch model. I probably wouldn’t have thumb-typed this post on its larger brother, either going for an external keyboard or my MacBook Pro instead.

Apple Frames: A Shortcut for Framing Screenshots From Every Apple Device →

October 11, 2018 · 09:45

Federico Viticci, on MacStories:

When I published my iPhone XS Frames shortcut two weeks ago, I noted that my goal was to eventually support screenshots and device templates from other Apple devices, starting with the Apple Watch and MacBook Pro. After two weeks spent rebuilding the shortcut and asking Silvia to prepare several more templates, I’m happy to re-introduce my shortcut as the new and improved Apple Frames – a comprehensive custom shortcut to frame screenshots taken on every Apple device. Well, at least most of the current ones that the company is still selling.

Federico has two versions of the shortcut for Apple’s Shortcuts app — with and without the Macs. They’re both brilliant.

Federico Viticci’s iPad-Only Setup — a Year in →

February 23, 2016 · 15:24

Federico Viticci wrote at length about his iPad-only workflow yesterday, and I have to say that I envy him that he can go and do this:

OS X is a fantastic desktop operating system, but it runs on machines that increasingly don’t fit the lifestyle of users who, like me, can’t sit down at a desk every day. I can’t (and I don’t want to) depend on Macs anymore because I want a computer that can always be with me. The majority of the world’s population doesn’t care about Xcode. I want to use an OS without (what I see as) cruft of decades of desktop conventions. I want powerful, innovative apps that I can touch. An iPad is the embodiment of all this.

I’m currently travelling, as you may have noticed, and I had a touch decision to make when packing — iPad Pro or MacBook Pro. I ultimately went with the MacBook for one reason, and one reason only — to retain the ability to edit my RAW files in Adobe Lightroom. iOS software still has a way to go, and I wish companies such as Adobe would start working on a full LR replacement, instead of making it a companion app.

A year into my iPad-only setup and with only one task left for my Mac, I feel safe to say I’ve moved past OS X at this point. The iPad Pro and iOS 9 have continued to free me from the physical constraints of my MacBook thanks to better hardware and a stronger software ecosystem. Macs are great, and they’re not going away any time soon, but they’re no longer the kind of computers I want to use. I need a computer that I can hold, with built-in 4G Internet and apps I can touch, and with a vibrant developer community whose apps constantly improve how I get work done. That’s an iPad.

I wonder at times if younger people have it easier when adopting a newer platform. I’m probably ten, if not more, years older than Federico, and I find things easier on OS X, most probably because I’ve known the intricacies of this operating system for a numbers of years now, whereas iOS is constantly evolving. This reminds me of the time in my teens when I used to play Doom a lot, using just the keyboard for everything. When I switched to Quake, I continued to use the keyboard, despite the fact that using a mouse and keyboard simultaneously gave the player much more precision. I still remember the day I walked into an internet café and saw four kids firing away, right hands on mice, left on keyboards. I finally made the switch, but it wasn’t easy for me, and they were probably just five or six years younger than me. The difference was that they skipped the keyboard-only phase…

And I never even tried to switch to playing FPS games on a gamepad…