New stuff!

Anyone who uses iTunes and the social music site last.fm will need to know that ScrobblePod is my find of the day. At last a replacement for the crashy/CPU looping iScrobbler which was abandoned by the developer.

This reminds me: abandonware on the iTunes Store. Your Articles Today - Daily Google Reader News was a great RSS reader with the most elegant black and white GUI. The latest version I downloaded (before it disappeared from the app Store) no longer links to Safari or Instapaper so I'm thinking about removing it from my iPad. All it will do is pull down new stuff from Google Reader. What to do? The developer is on LinkedIn and Facebook so I could bug the guy but I think not. I've seen many shareware apps abandoned and the fact that I've made a payment has never cut much ice with developers — other projects become more important or they will plead poverty. The only solution I can see is sharing the love: get on the App Store and rate and review the apps that I like, thereby spreading the news and increasing the popularity of the app while it's still supported.

PS I've abandoned the last post (below) about iPod/iPhone apps. There are too many of them now. I must add that the Defender game has now arrived! Defender! is a reasonable copy of the original and Planet Defence is older but looks better.

iPod photo

The iPod is now mainstream, but as Insanely Great reminds us, it's nothing compared to blue jeans, now there's a product. And Mac360 posits that the new iPod photo may be Apple's first iPod mistake? Who cares, it's 60 gig, I could get most of my music on there. The U2 iPod is a mistake for me because I don't care for U2. Perhaps the iPod is too popular for these Mac sites to endorse now it is no longer Mac-only.

I'll tell you what's so great about the iPod: the design, which allows you to hold it in one hand and scroll or scrub and select all the lists and playlists and contacts and the calendar and notes and play the games and pause and power off and change the volume by moving only your thumb on that hand. Brilliant design. A world-beater. The notes are really useful: there are already databases available to tell you where the nearest wi-fi or toilet is. Well, fairly useful.

I'll also tell you this: the iPod is only the hardware component of iTunes. The iTunes Music Store is but a single window in iTunes. The photo functions of the iPod photo need iTunes to sync. And the iPod is nothing compared to Apple's revolutionary product before last: Airport Express and AirTunes - which needs iTunes.

Now some random iPod stories:

I beg to inform you that Podcasting killed the HTML star. It's a big phenomenon and I've just noticed it. Even the BBC has the podcasting bug. It's an RSS feed with audio that you can download to your mp3 player, or listen to on your computer. Brilliant idea, to supplement the thousands of radiostreams, now anyone can be a DJ or pundit on demand without having to worry about supplying a 24 hour feed. As Les Posen says: 'podcasting is less about the method of delivery and more about freedom of choice and democratisation of the spoken word'.

Update: now NetNewsWire supports podcasts, so you can download new stuff automatically to your iPod and listen to it while travelling.

And for those of you who are instant musicians using Apple's amazing GarageBand, or something more exotic, there's a new site MacIdol that gives you 3 GB free to store your music and let others hear it - and stick it on their iPods.

Empty iPod? For those of you with no record collection or musical knowledge: an iPod PlayList book. Links to iMixes on the iTunes Music Store. I haven't seen the playlists so I can't recommend this. By the way, this is my first iMix (iTunes link).

Are you as above, plus wealthy? Maybe the sort of person who buys books by the yard, before Hello magazine visits? Then you need MusicGuru. I found this site hilarious.

Or you could get someone else to rip all your CDs for you at a dollar a disc: the FillPod chappie teaches his customers how to do backups as well, and he doesn't keep copies, he says, which must mean he will be decoding the same CDs over and over, which must mean he has the volume turned right down.

Ballmer's iPod [via Pogue's Posts - always worth a look.]

The iBend is a one-off art piece - this must be one of the few eBay pages with a sound sample - for which bidding has ended.

Now, you can bring the Heavy Metal experience everywhere, the only thing better is being on the stage with your favorite metal band.

The iBend comes with four rocking guitar solos, that you control. Jam out with the radical whammy CENSTRON bend wheel, or rock the extreme pitch knob, you won't be disappointed. You may even get that elusive guitar god gig you have been looking for. Begin your new life, with the iBend.

iPod Socks are real, not something I made up. I think I want some!

We all know we can plug an iPod into a Smart car or a not-so-smart BMW, but how about a portable block party?

This paragraph contains an unmixed metaphor. The iTunes plugin for Audioscrobbler is called iScrobbler and its latest incarnation manages to copy data from my iPod to my Audioscrobbler page if I do things in the right order. As a guide, there is a text file with the plugin called iPod Submission Limitations, something the UK press does not have now. Stay with me. In tonight's Evening Standard (8/12/04) there is a big article on the iPod flash, a rumoured new device. For an old Apple fan like me, this is like seeing Hawkwind's new album win the Mercury prize. But don't they realize that if they spill the beans on Steve Jobs' latest project, he may just can it?