Andy Dust

Let’s kick things off with some good old fashioned whining. Here are a few areas where I think the iPod Touch (as of v1.1.4) could be smarter.

‘On-The-Go’ Playlist Management on the go.

Other generations of the iPod allow users to hold down the center button when selecting a song. This automatically adds it to the ‘On-The-Go’ playlist. It isn’t amazing; but it is useful.

No such luck on the iPod Touch. I have tried double clicking, triple swooping, angrily shaking¹. The only way to append a playlist is to leave the current song selection, enter the playlist tab and search through the entire collection. Quite inconvenient. There should at least be a shortcut to ‘Now Playing’ once in the playlist edit mode.

Song Rating filter.

Fairly self explanatory. Where is the ‘Top Rated’ filter? Why allow the user to rate each track on the fly if he or she cannot filter their collection with this information (let me know if I’m missing something here). Sure, one could create a ‘Smart Playlist‘ in iTunes; but it’s not really the same as being able to do it on the go.

The Safari back button.

Apparently Safari on the iPod Touch does cache content; unfortunately you may not notice. A page appears to take the same amount of time to load regardless of whether or not the user accesses it through the back button.

Perhaps the real issue is with page rendering on the device. Even so, pressing the back button should successfully load the previous page even if an active internet connection has been lost.

At least the Weather App data (an application for which I had to pay) is now cached.

There you have it, my first ever blog post.

* ¹ Here’s one for those geo-hashing Fire Eagle folk: there should be an iPhone app, using the accelerometer, that detects when the user shakes their device with furious anger and rage. It could then present a Google map of the location of the nearest Apple representative; or if need be other angry users nearby. Not that it would be needed that often, of course.