Draw Every Day January 28, 2012: The Astronaut and the iPod

I love my bag of astronauts! For this drawing, I pulled one out of the bag with a flag and put it on my desk in front of my iPod Nano.  Ironic, since, they share the same country of origin.  Funny how the American flag the astronaut holds is all torn up (it does have 13 stripes, however--I counted!).

Draw Every Day for January 9, 2012: How Was This Ever Enough?!?

My old 5G iPod still functions, though the battery doesn't hold a charge.  Sad how I got the note backwards on the iPod screen.  Stupid.  Did the whole thing from memory (obviously) well, except for the symbols on the click wheel.

My Apple iPhone/iPod/iEverything-related Wishlist

“Dear Steve,” from brentbillock:

My top four requests for Apple.

1. Voice Control  on iPhone for more than just music and calling. For example: “Launch Maps,” “Create Email,” “Open Google,” or “Turn On Bluetooth.” Invoking Voice Memos with Voice Control seems especially obvious.


2. In iTunes, please let me delete a terrible song, no matter what playlist I’m in when I hear it. Now I have to go find it in the “Music” view.


3. In iTunes/iPhone integration, please sync smart playlists with “live updating.” That’s the whole point of smart playlists. I shouldn’t have to turn it off in order to take those tunes with me.


4. Direct access to photos and videos shot with iPhone. This “iPhoto to iMovie which may or may not coordinate with iTunes” process is ridiculously clumsy. Please let me drag and drop and decide later what application I want to use.

It’s only because so much of the UX is done so well that small problems like this annoy me.

How about a single application to rule them all? Instead of iPhoto, iTunes and iMovie, how ‘bout just iApp that allows you to just stay in one app?

Better yet, why not just integrate these apps into Finder?

Why bother with the illusion of an application at all?  Or is it all because of the iTunes Store?  Well, that shouldn’t rule out the iApp to rule them all, then.

#WTHeck? Why does Apple charge $4.99 for Tetris for Click-Wheel iPods??

Seriously, Tetris should be waaaay cheaper than this.  In fact, all click-wheel games should be cheaper than this (they seem to all be $5).  I know the idea is to push folks to buy games for the iPhone/iPod Touch and I also understand that these games are less popular—but for folks who maybe can’t afford the more pricey iDevices, charging a couple bucks versus FIVE might look pretty appealing.  Once these games are hosted, Apple does virtually NOTHING to make them available.  So, you’d think they’d be interested in making these things get downloaded more easily.

Or maybe Apple doesn’t want more money—maybe they just want EVERYONE TO HAVE AN iPHONE.

Well, I already have one and am tired of finding new ways to run the battery down, so: :P

Something ELSE Apple won’t let me do...

Something ELSE Apple won’t let me do: sync podcasts to my 2nd Gen iPod Shuffle.

WHY, APPLE?  WHY randomly decide no auto syncing of podcasts allowed on Shuffles??

Do Apple engineers sit around with various features written out on cards pinned to the wall so they can throw darts at them to decide which to leave out?

Seriously. WTF, Apple??

iPod Shuffle Prices Drop--I Smell a New Model!

 

Just got this email from Apple saying that Apple is dropping the price of a 1 gig iPod shuffle to $49. That's down from the original price of $79. That's a HUGE price drop and it's one I don't think we'd see unless they were trying to get rid of their supply to make room for......a NEW iPOD SHUFFLE MODEL!!Wahoo!

OK, so, replacing the lowest end of the iPod line isn't that exciting, but hey, I like cheap tech! And who knows? Maybe the replacement will come with a display screen or maybe we'll see the Nano drop in price to $79, which is really how much a video player with a screen that tiny is worth.

Mobile post sent by thepete using Utterz.  Replies.

UPDATE: Whoopsie pants!  Turns out they've already announced  a new 2GB Shuffle for just $69.  Ah, well.  So much for the idea of an uber-cheap Nano!  Read more at TUAW.com here: http://www.tuaw.com/2008/02/19/shuffle-price-drop/

Is THIS What Steve Jobs Will Announce Tomorrow?

Sheesh--I guess I've been out of the gadget loop because I heard about the iPod Touch (the rumor about the all-touch-screen iPhone look-a-like with a huge flash drive and wireless connectivity), the iPhone Nano (the dumbed-down, priced-down version of the iPhone, and of course, the iCar (a car to be co-developed by Apple and Volkswagon or Jaguar) but I only today spotted what many are calling the iPod Nano Phat. "Phat" was the word added to the original design of the Nintendo DS that hit stores to describe how much bigger it was than the DS Lite while still suggesting it was kinda cool. It was also shorthand for fugly.

The same goes here, I think. It seems like all Apple did was widen the iPod Nano to give it a wider screen. This is kind of a stupid move on its own because who will suddenly change their mind about a Nano because it now plays videos on a still-too-small-but-slightly-bigger-screen?

Beats me, man.

What they should do tomorrow is announce the iPod Touch and the iPod Touch Nano--which would be, respectively, the full-sized iPod with the wide-screen taking up the entire face of the iPod (similar to the look of the iPhone) and a much smaller iPod, the same size as the current Nano's only it should have a touch screen taking up it's entire front face, too. Once the click-wheel disappears from the full-sized iPod no one will want to see it anywhere.

So will he announce any of the above? Obviously, we'll just have to wait and see what Steve says. If he says something amazing or amazingly unimpressive, I'll blog on it for sure. If it's something "eh" like Beatles music on iTunes or something like that, I got some other stuff to do with my blogtime.

OH yeah and one other feature with the iPod Touch would be wifi. At the very least it'll be able to buy mp3/4s off the iTunes store and at the very most it'll surf the web like the iPhone can, it just won't have any cell phone features. If the latter happens, I'm going to have to sell a kidney to get one. I'll react like Gomer Fricken' Pyle and yell "SHAZAM!"

You can check out the Gizmodo.com post I stole the above pic from.

Oh and I just checked out AppleInsider.com and found a few interesting headlines:

Major electronics launch; new iPods & iPhones; Apple lobbying

DigiTimes vouches for multi-touch iPod with WiFi

Apple's next-gen iPod nano takes its lumps as current models run dry

That's the site I'll be checking first since they did such a great job liveblogging the iPhone announcement.

Let's hope these rumors are right and that Steve will actually be announcing something important this time, as opposed to another device that looks slick but does what many other devices of its kind already do.