One of the great things about working for O'Reilly is that I get to check out the latest books. Yesterday I got a PDF copy of iPod: The Missing Manual, 5th Edition, by New York Times Circuits writer J.D. Biersdorfer. My mission: to extract some of the tips and present them in HTML so you can see them too.
On the surface, that seemed like a simple cut-and-paste exercise, but as soon as I cracked open the PDF, I was struck by the book's elegant layout. It was colorful, concise, and clear. This is a manual?! I ended up reading quite a bit of it instead of just trawling along with the text-selector. I was particularly impressed that some of the screenshots seemed to have been taken this week; it really felt up-to-date.
Biersdorfer says she wrote the book for "beginner to intermediate iPodders of all ages," but it has extensive coverage of iTunes tricks as well, quite a few of which were new to me.
As background before I began the tip extraction, O'Reilly's Sara Peyton forwarded this recent interview with Biersdorfer. It's not often that you get to see the humanity behind a manual, so I thought I'd share it here.
Peyton: Why is your book especially important now?
Biersdorfer: The iPod has moved into a whole new realm with its video capabilities, so that is covered in this edition. Also, a lot of people may have bought their first iPods several years ago and are now having to upgrade, and this book explains all the new stuff.
This is a very different version of the book. It's full of color illustrations and the text has been recast as short little infonuggets that only take one or two pages per topic. There aren't miles of text to wade through if you want to, say, learn how to copy your Outlook contacts over to the iPod so you can look up phone numbers on the go. You get a simple explanation for each task and enough color graphics to show you just what you need to do.
Peyton: What is the most important thing readers of your book will be able to do?
Biersdorfer: They will now be able to use their iPods to the device's fullest potential: not just music, but video, contacts, calendars, photos, text files, games, and more.
The iPod just turned 5 and there are 68 million of them out there. It is without a doubt one of the defining devices of a generation, yet a lot of people don't know that it can do so much more besides play music. This book shows you how and hopefully gets you thinking what else an iPod can do.
Peyton: Do you recommend one iPod over another?
Biersdorfer: There's pretty much an iPod for every listening lifestyle these days. Just need some tunes for your cardio workout? The iPod Shuffle is your sturdy, no-muss, no-fuss model that can store more than 200 songs but doesn't have a screen you have to worry about breaking. If you're into running, fashion, or just want an iPod that can do a bunch of things besides music, there's the lightweight Nano that displays photos, plays games, stores contacts and even doubles as a stopwatch. Finally, if you want it all — or you have a really long commute — the iPod with video does everything the Nano can, and brings videogames, movies, TV shows, and music videos along for the ride, too.
Peyton: What's on your iPod?
Biersdorfer: I use my iPod for all sorts of things. If I'm away from home, I use my iPod as a pocket TiVo by wiring it up to the closest TV with the iPod AV cable and watching Battlestar Galactica and other shows I really hate to miss. I'm also reading Boswell's Life of Johnson on the iPod, thanks to a free download from Project Gutenberg.
My iPod, for better or for worse, is a mirror of my brain, all polished up from my CD collection, the iTunes Store, and things I've found around the Internet. Right now, it's stuffed with bluegrass music; Broadway show tunes; lots of Steve Earle and Green Day; the Nellie McKay catalog; free downloads of Beethoven symphonies from the BBC Web site; a digitized recording of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s, "I Have a Dream" speech; Glenn Gould's version of The Goldberg Variations; several episodes of Battlestar Galactica; Pac-man; and a shelf of electronic books that takes up much less room in a tiny New York apartment than paper ones.
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Read More Entries by David Battino.
Ha Ha Girl: See the instructions that came with your iPod for directions on resetting it. On the 3rd-generation Nano, for example, you do that by flipping the Hold switch on and off and then holding down the Menu and center buttons for five seconds.
I was Trying to download Some music,I put the adapter in the Computer and the itunes would not show up and i didn't know what to do so i put the adapter out of the iPod and it froze. I just got It and are freeking out please help me