[WARNING: GEEK TALK]
Well, the day brought some moves from Apple that I feel like talking to someone about, so it might as well be you, Faithful Reader.
iPod
The updates are pretty cool. Brighter screen. More games. Longer battery life. But no killer upgrade, nothing that’s making me look at my 3G iPod and begin to cry. It’s still just not worth upgrading. I’m not (currently) a commuter, and I don’t travel a lot, so that means portable video really doesn’t much interest me.
The new Shuffle, roughly the size of a book of matches by the looks of it, has jumped in storage capacity and dropped in price, making it the most likely candidate if I were to decide to add another iPod to the family.
The new Nanos look pretty cool. Apple obviously noticed that the resale market for iPod Minis was still fairly strong (which doesn’t ultimately make them any more money), and adjusted the Nano’s design accordingly.
iTunes
The update to iTunes and the iT(M)S is where the real money is. Again, I don’t see myself purchasing many movies, but it’s cool that they’re available. Let’s say, for instance, that Michelle and I are stranded miles and miles from a Best Buy but we still have internet access. We could totally still, with the click of the mouse, own any Disney-owned movie that we wanted.
But seriously, the iTunes update offers some features that have been in demand from “the community” for a while now. The ability to automatically add album art to selected songs is fantastic, although it still feels a bit buggy. I didn’t think Apple would actually get the labels to agree to such a service. After all, those cover images are just as copywrit as the songs themselves.
The jukebox-inspired cover art browser is fun to play with, but I’m not sure I see it as a practical means of sorting through the 1600+ albums residing in my library. There are a few bugs with it, too. For one, I can’t seem to figure out how to get compilations to appear all together. Also, when you select the cover you’re looking for, iTunes goes to the first song on the album, but it doesn’t break the album out from the rest of the library’s massive songlist. All in all, though, it’s pretty cool, and Apple again proves that no other music player on any platform boasts as many features as iTunes. I am also very happy to see that Apple didn’t just straight-up steal this idea from CoverFlow.
The introduction of gapless playback doesn’t so much feel like a new feature as a bug fix, but it is nice to finally be able to listen to film scores and other continuous music without the jolt of a track change.
There are plenty of other additions, such as the new layout of the source list, and the new way that iPods and other devices are treated. But the only other thing I’ve noticed that I haven’t seen many people blog about is the addition of Skip statistics to each track. iTunes now keeps track of how many times you skip over a song. This is yet another useful characteristic for creating smart playlists. For example, I could create a smart playlist of 50 of my top rated songs, but exclude tracks that have been skipped more than 5 times, which would indicate that I’m probably getting tired of them. Plus it could provide a statistic for songs that I might have played but not finished, because iTunes only records a “play” when it gets to the very end of the song.
Anyway, nobody’s coming to this place for expert tech analysis. These are just observations of someone with a few years’ experience with the family of products described.
Anyone find any other nifty features?
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