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There are a ton of great apps out there designed to snag, convert and shovel big heaps of video onto your iPod and iPhone, and I talked about a few of them at this year's Macworld Expo 2008 in San Francisco. Among my absolute favorites:
QuickTime Pro. Apple's own multimedia powerhouse lets you convert a ton of different formats into iPod-ready video with just a simple menu command. It's only $30 and well worth the price.
TubeSock. This nifty little app converts your favorite YouTube videos from the Web and save 'em right into iTunes, where they're only a sync away from going with you on your iPod or iPhone. There's a free demo version that converts the first 30 seconds of video, and the full version is only $15 -- much less than a single movie ticket and a small stale popcorn in most cities.
Handbrake. If you've got a DVD movie from your collection that you'd like to take along on your iPod or iPhone, this little open-source wonder will convert it into a Pod-friendly file quite nicely.
And even though I talked about these in the O'Reilly booth at *MAC*world, all of these programs have Windows versions as well.
Problem: I do a lot of writing. I go through notebooks furiously, filling them up with notes, thoughts, stories, and shopping lists. My family has recently caught on, and begun buying me notebooks for gifts, so that I have quite a store of them, and should I misplace a notebook I can just open up a new one until I find the old, half-full notebook lying under a stack of unopened mail, and try to figure out a way to combine everything written in the new book into the old book, even though I'm really too lazy to copy it all over.
Solution: I'd much rather have an electronic notebook - just a pocket sized gadget, about the size of an iPod, with a keypad and a text editor, on which I can write and store all of my notes. And I don't mean just a sticky-note type program - I want full scale writing capabilities. I want to be able to write a whole story in one note if I should so desire, and then go back and edit the file, and save it again.
Even better would be an application for my iPod Touch, to turn it into a text editor. I wouldn't have to buy a new device, and since I already bring my iPod everywhere and look after it furiously, the chances of damaging or misplacing it are slim. The iPod Touch has already got the touch screen keyboard and the ability to store information, so I hope that with the new DevKits Apple has released, this isn't far off.
Are you listening programmers? Build me a TypePod!
This is a small one and possibly the EASIEST Missing Feature to institute ever.
Like finding water in the desert, so sometimes goes the search for an outlet at the airport. |
I've been traveling a lot in the past six months and have always tried to keep my laptop battery at close to 100 percent when the plane takes off. That means the need to be plugged in right before boarding. The problem is there are SO FEW OUTLETS at most airport gates.
Here's what I'm proposing:
Step 1: Go to Home Depot with a company credit card.
Step 2: Buy four long power strips and extension cords per gate; Buy enough electrical tape to safely mount the wires out of the way of little children and the clumsy.
Step 3: Plug in these extension cords to existing outlets and expand the number of outlets to where people sit in the terminal.
Step 4: Using a color printer, highlight the locations of these new power strips.
Step 5: Feel the love from your customers.
It seems one third to one half of all airline travelers have a device that could use some juice, so why not provide it?
Problem:
You're prepared to be stuck at the $&$^%#%@ airport for nine &#&$%%#^ hours when you remember you have a Netflix account and you can use your broadband wireless card to watch some movies to kill the time. However, you are on a Mac and you are told the following:
"Your system is not compatible with watching instantly
"Your computer's operating system is not compatible with watching instantly.
"Try again from a computer running Windows XP Service Pack 2 or Windows Vista."
The Answer:
Steve Jobs and Slingbox (The technology that Netflix is powered by) need to work out a solution to enable the growing marketshare of users who are switching to Macs to be able to get full value from services like Netflix's Watch it Now and the live streaming feature on DirecTV's SuperFan NFL package. Perhaps there could be a conversion through Flip for Mac that could accommodate this?
Problem:
One cellphone doesn't fit every situation.
Missing Feature:
I've got more than one iPod and more than one computer. Why oh why won't my cell phone company take more of my money and let me have multiple phones? The cellular providers and mobile phone manufacturers are missing a golden opportunity. Just as I own different iPods for different occasions I can't be the only gadget geek who'd love to have multiple phones. My iPhone, say, when I'm traveling or at work. But how about a sporty little number for when I'm at the beach, or a sleek Vertu for when I'm at an awards show in my tux? I'd never give up my iPhone, but I'd love to have other phones in my mobile repertoire.
As I wait impatiently for FedEx to get here with my copy of Leopard, I took a few minutes to take Safari over to the iPhone Dev Center page on Apple's site. With the company's recent announcement that a software developer's kit for the iPhone is on the way early next year, there's been a lot of buzz about the potential for new applications from third-party developers.
The iPhone Dev Center site has a lot of cool geeky stuff already -- sample code, videos, reference libraries, and Web development guidelines about app-crafting for the iPhone and iPod Touch. To see the goods, though, you need to have an Apple Developer Connection membership. Don't worry, you can sign up for a free online membership here. But as I was poking around the page, I saw a note saying you could also just sign in with your .Mac username and password. Rawk!
Once you get signed in, the links on the iPhone Dev Center site go live so you can start checking out the content. You can even download the seven iPhone Tech Talk videos on the page and watch them with iTunes. "iPhone User Interface Design" and "Managing Content and Synced Data for iPhone" are two of the titles -- nuke up the Orville Redenbacher!
Sorry for the long stretch o' nothin' between posts here. As you may have heard, Apple released a whole bunch of new iPods last month and for us in Missing Manual Land, that's a cue to get cracking on a new edition. And we have.
iPod: The Missing Manual, Sixth Edition is off to the printer and will be out in stores soon. In the meantime, here are a few tidbits gleaned from doing this new version of the book.
Quicker naps for your iPod.
There's a quick way to put your iPod Classic or Nano to sleep with one quick tap now—without having to hold down Play/Pause. You can add a "Sleep" option right on your iPod’s main menu. To do so, go to iPod -> Settings -> Main Menu and scroll down toward the bottom of the list. Select "Sleep" and press the center button to add it to your iPod's main menu, where you can select it anytime you want the iPod to take a nap and save its battery power for later.
Fetching missing album art.
Cover Flow on the new iPods makes your music look great, but you get a bunch of gray, generic covers if you don't have the actual album artwork embedded in your song files. You can make iTunes get it for you by choosing Advanced -> Get Album Artwork. Odds are iTunes can find a lot of your missing art, but if it can't, it pops up a message telling you it didn't find everything. But here's the handy part — it tells you which ones it couldn't find when you expand the bottom of the alert message. With this shopping list in hand, you can head over to Amazon and snag the missing image files yourself by searching for the album name. Once you see an image on screen, drag it off the Amazon Web page to your desktop — and then into the empty artwork window for that song in iTunes.
Dudes, don't get me wrong: I love my iPhone. But this thing's definitely got a few signs of version-one-point-oh-itis. Exhibit A: Every time I (and apparently lots of others) try to use the phone's iPod program while browsing the Web, the iPod crashes. On the iPhone crashing simply means that the music stops. You've got to then finger click your way back to iPod to re-start the music...until it happens again about a minute later. Kinda takes the fun out of showing off your new gadget to all the (ok, both) Zune owners you know.
One poster to the Apple discussion forums advised powering the phone on and off (hold down the Sleep/Wake switch on the top of the phone for three seconds). I tried this to no avail. The prevailing opinion out there in Fix It Land seems to be that this bug will only (hopefully?) be fixed upon the release of Apple's first iPhone software update. Let's hope that comes soon.
I'll be the first to admit: my experience with first generation Apple products is they tend to be buggy.
How easy is it to read long passages of text on the iPhone? That's a question I've been wanting to answer since the Holy Phone was announced this past January. I've long had a reading-related fantasy (trust me, this won't get dirty) that I could use the iPhone as a kind of auxiliary monitor. Stuff a few software-related how-to doc's onto the phone, and then perform the actual tasks on my main monitor. I don't know about you, but when it comes to reading documentation online I always end up printing it out since I can't stand switching back and forth between, say, Photoshop Elements and the info onscreen that's telling me how to use the histogram. Once I got my hands on an actual iPhone and saw firsthand the jaw-dropping clarity of its 3.5 inch 160 dpi screen, I couldn't wait to run a few tests.
I took a look at three different kinds of content: a book from O'Reilly's Safari online reading library, a Web site whose layout appeared especially readable on the iPhone, and a PDF.
The verdict? iPhone-friendly Web sites are the clear winner. Safari books take second place and are readable for about 10 pages or so at time. PDFs are as lame as ever on the small screen. Pictures, comments, and some suggestions after the jump.
I have in my possession a nugget, a secret bit of iPhone information that's so valuable, such a headache- and time-saver, that I don't know what to do with it.
One voice in my head says, "Hoard it! Keep it a secret until your book is published! If you reveal it, it'll be all over the Net in hours, and all your competitors' books will have it, too."
But another voice says, "But this information is too good to keep quiet. Plus, you didn't discover it yourself. And besides, you're not gonna starve, either way."
Eventually, the second little voice prevailed. I'm going to share with you the solution to one of the most annoying things, if not THE most annoying thing, about typing on the iPhone:
The punctuation keys and alphabet keys appear in two different keyboard layouts.
So every time you want to type a period or a comma, it's a three-step, awkward dance: (1) Tap the ".?123" key in the lower left to summon the punctuation layout. (2) Type the period. (3) Tap the ABC key in the lower left to return to the alphabet layout.
Imagine how excruciating it is to type, for example, "a P.O. Box in the U.S.A."! That's 34 finger taps and 10 mode changes!
And therefore imagine how thrilled I was to receive an email from reader Andrew McCallum, containing a method of typing a period or a comma with only a SINGLE finger gesture.
The iPhone doesn't register most key presses until you *release* your finger. But Andrew discovered that the Shift and Punctuation keys register their taps on the *press-down* instead.
So here's what you can do, all in one motion:
1. Touch the ".?123" key, but don't lift your finger as the punctuation layout appears.
2. Slide your finger a half inch onto the period or comma key, and release.
Incredibly, the ABC layout returns automatically. You've typed a period or a comma with one finger touch instead of three. In fact, you can type ANY of the punctuation symbols the same way.
This makes a HUGE difference in the usability of the keyboard.
I'm sending Andrew an autographed copy of iPhone: The Missing Manual.
Come to think of it, I'll send you one, too, for any tip you discover that I wind up using (and didn't know already)! Let me know: david@pogueman.com.
Type on, bro.
Be sure to also check out David Pogue's Favorite iPhone Tricks
The iPhone's finger-driven interface seems natural and obvious. But when you really think about it, making it seem that way was no easy task. There are no menus in the iPhone software, for example, and no checkboxes or radio buttons. Everything on the screen has to be big enough for a fleshy fingertip.
On the other hand, the finger makes an outstanding pointing device; heck, you've been pointing with it all your life. It's much faster to scroll diagonally with a fingertip, for example, than with fussy adjustments on two different scroll bars.
Here, then, are some of the iPhone's unadvertised taps, double-taps, and other shortcuts, all culled from iPhone: The Missing Manual.
Double-Tapping
Double-tapping is actually pretty rare on the iPhone. It's not like the Mac or Windows, where double-clicking the mouse means "open." On the iPhone, you open something with one tap.
A double tap, therefore, is reserved for three functions:
- In Photos, Google Maps, and Safari (the Web browser), double-tapping zooms in on whatever you tap, magnifying it by a factor of two.
- In the same programs, as well as Mail, double-tapping means, "restore to original size" after you've zoomed in. (Weirdly, in Google Maps, you use a different gesture to zoom out: tap once with two fingers. That gesture appears nowhere else on the iPhone.)
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When you're watching a video, double-tapping eliminates or restores letterbox bars.
See, the iPhone's screen is bright, vibrant, and stunningly sharp. It's not, however, the right shape for videos.
Standard TV shows are squarish, not rectangular. So when you watch TV shows, you get black letterbox columns on either side of the picture.
Movies have the opposite problem. They're too wide for the iPhone screen. So when you watch movies, you wind up with letterbox bars above and below the picture.
Some people are fine with that. At least when letterbox bars are onscreen, you know you're seeing the complete composition of the scene the director intended.
Other people can't stand letterbox bars. You're already watching on a pretty small screen; why sacrifice some of that precious area to black bars?
That's why the iPhone gives you a choice. If you double-tap the video as it plays, you zoom in, magnifying the image so that it fills the entire screen.
Part of the image is now off the screen; now you're not seeing the entire composition originally broadcast. You lose the top and bottom of TV scenes, or the left and right edges of movie scenes.
If this effect winds up chopping off something important--some text on the screen, for example--restoring the original letterbox view is just another double-tap away.
Secrets of the Sensors
The iPhone has three cool sensors. First, it has an accelerometer that detects when you've rotated the iPhone into landscape orientation. In programs like Photos, Safari, and iPod, it triggers the screen image to rotate as well.
Camouflaged behind the black glass where you can't see them except with a bright flashlight are two more sensors: a proximity sensor that shuts off the screen illumination and touch sensitivity when the phone is against your head (it works only in the Phone application), and an ambient-light sensor that brightens the display when you're in sunlight and dims it in darker places.
Apple says that it experimented with having the light sensor active all the time, but it was weird to have the screen get brighter and darker all the time. So the sensor now samples the ambient light, and adjusts the brightness; it does this only once--each time you unlock the phone after waking it.
You can use that tip to your advantage. By covering up the sensor (just above the earpiece) as you unlock the phone, you force it to a low-power, dim screen-brightness setting (because the phone believes that it's in a dark room). Or by holding it up to a light as you wake it, you get full brightness. In both cases, you've saved all the taps and navigation it would have taken you to find the manual brightness slider in Settings.
Earbud Cord Switch
Without close inspection, you'd have a hard time telling the iPhone's white stereo earbuds apart from a regular iPod's--but don't get them mixed up. The iPhone's earbuds have a tiny, embedded clicker/microphone partway down the right earbud cord.
That's right, "clicker/microphone." The tiny bulge is the microphone for phone calls. But if you pinch the bulge, you'll find that it clicks.
- Pinch once to answer an incoming phone call. Pinch for a couple seconds to dump the call to voicemail. (You can also double-tap the Sleep/Wake switch on top of the iPhone to send the call to voicemail.)
- During music or video playback, pinch once to pause the music; pinch again to resume playback.
- During music playback, double-pinch to skip to the next song.
Customizing the iPod Buttons
The iPod module on the iPhone starts out with buttons along the bottom for summoning four lists: Playlists, Artists, Songs, and Videos.
But what about Albums? Genres? Composers?
They're there, all right, but hidden; you have to tap More to see them.
But what if you use those lists more often than Artists or Songs? No problem: you can replace one of those starter buttons with a list of your own.
Tap More, and then tap the Edit button (upper-left corner). You arrive at the Configure screen. Here's the complete list of music-and-video sorting lists: Albums, Podcasts, Audiobooks, Genres, Composers, Compilations, Playlists, Artists, Songs, and Videos.
To replace one of the four starter icons, use a finger to drag an icon from the top half of the screen downward, directly onto the existing icon you want to replace. It lights up to show the success of your drag.
When you release your finger, you'll see that the new icon has replaced the old one. Tap Done in the upper-right corner.
Keyboard Speedups
Don't bother using the Shift key to capitalize a new sentence. The iPhone does that capitalizing automatically.
Don't put apostrophes in contractions, either; the iPhone will put those in for you, too.
Force Quit, Reset
The iPhone is pretty darned simple and stable, but it's still a computer. In times of troubleshooting, these tips may come in handy:
- Force quit a program. Press and hold the Home button for six seconds to force-quit a program that seems to be stuck.
- Reset. If the entire iPhone locks up--it can happen--press and hold both the Home button and the Sleep/Wake switch for eight seconds. You'll see the screen go black, and then the Apple logo appears as the iPhone reboots.
More iPhone timesavers from David: a punctuation-typing shortcut. Perfect for heavy keyboard users.
Gadget geeks, rev up your credit cards! The new iPhone ads on Apple's Web site announce that the phone will be available June 29th, just a few short weeks away. Expect a data explosion at the end of the month on blogs and tech sites as the early adopters snap up the device and dissect the good, the bad, and the why-did-this-&^%$#@-thing-do-that?
Wanna make your mobile phone go nuts? Sign up for Twitter and get a lot of friends.
Twitter, which got a big boost in popularity and an award at the SXSW conference earlier this year, is a service that lets you describe what you're doing at that very moment in 140 characters or less -- which can make for a lot of SMS haiku. After you sign up with Twitter, you can post your abbreviated thoughts through your page on the Twitter site, by texting the Twitter number on your mobile phone, or even by instant message; AIM, Jabber and Google Talk are currently supported.
And, because Twitter is a social service, you can collect "friends" and have all of their posts (called "tweets") show up on your page, phone, or message window so you always know what all your pals are up to. You can choose to make your Twitter messages public to the world, or private to just your friends. When I first heard about Twitter a few months ago, I was sort of dubious about wanting to read a lot of pointless posts on my phone.
Yes, Twitter can be completely frivolous ("I'm waiting in line at the store to buy carrots"), but after using it for a while, I can see it has a lot of potential.
So, the next version of Mac OS X, (10.5, or Leopard, for those following Apple's Big Cat Scorecard) won't be arriving in June after all, according to a statement Apple released on its Web site yesterday. Because the company had to pull programmers off the OS X team to help muscle the iPhone to its June release date, Leopard won't prowl until October. Oh, well.
While part of me is bummed about not having a shiny new operating system to play around with this summer, that also means I won't have to spend those inevitable hours trying to get all my gadgets, hardware and software to work with it. Operating system upgrades can cause all sorts of upheaval, with hardware drivers and certain programs not working the same way in the new system as they did on the old. Windows Vista early adopters with iPods got to experience this first-hand when a problem between iTunes and Vista reared its ugly head right after Vista's January release. Luckily, most of the major problems were resolved with the release of iTunes 7.1.1, but there are still a few lingering issues; Apple describes them here, Vista adventurers.
So Leopard is put off until fall. While I'm half disappointed and half relieved, I think there's one thing Mac users probably won't have to worry about when they upgrade: since Apple is calling the software shots, iTunes and Leopard (at least) will get along just fine.
Despite the number of chargers I haul around, it hadn't really occurred to me just how reliant I am on portable power until three of my most-used gadgets recently started to show that inevitable sign of lithium-based battery age: the inability to hold a charge for very long. The mobile phone and laptop are both due for upgrades this year (hel-LO, iPhone!), but I must admit I'm getting sentimental about the charge-challenged iPod.
It's not like this is my only iPod, either, or even the newest. Since we tend to update iPod: The Missing Manual at least once a year in an attempt to keep it fresh, tasty and timely, I have more than a few Pods around the house, all purchased for book-research purposes. No, the iPod in question here is an old 40-gigabyte iPod Photo model that I bought in the fall of 2004. It was the first iPod with a color screen and one of the last models to come with a huge amount of accessories (like a dock, AV cable, AC adapter, USB and FireWire cables) right in the box. Man, those where the days....
In addition to the office-job commute, This Old Pod has come along with me to London, Paris, Pensacola, Philadelphia, and Gettysburg (and holds photos from all of the above, plus iLingo's French lessons and a couple years worth of Samuel Pepys' diaries I got from Project Gutenberg). I use my video iPod and the sporty Nano when the need arises, but I fell into a habit of using iPod Photo as my daily walkabout companion. It hasn't died yet, but its battery life is noticeably shorter between trips to the wall charger.
I'm sure there are more than a few folks out there reading this who may be in a similar situation, and probably with their one-and-only iPod. So, what to do? I figure if I want to keep using my faithful gadget, I have two options: replace the battery or plant the Pod permanently in a set of speakers that keep it powered while it plays.
Two years ago I got my first Treo cell phone. I thought I was the coolest kid on the block. Now I'm ready to hurl the thing out my 12th floor window, or at least marinate it overnight in a bowl of coffee. Why? It's got a serious case of response-time sluggishness, aka button lag. Every time I click one of the onscreen controls (voicemail, contacts, etc.) I end up having to wait while the thing...what? calculates? eats its mini-processor spinach? I don't know...but whatever it's doing, it's taking way too long, making me give less than a hoot about all the other things it supposedly can do (take pictures, videos, browse the Web, listen to music). Now I know I can spend time reading through the help section of Palm's Web site or Verizon's (my cell carrier), but, c'mon: I just want the thing to work.
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