iPod - page 11

Beta 3 of the iPhone OS 4.0 SDK has a couple of great new interface features, including the ability to close background apps through a hold-and-close method similar to the way deleting programs functions on the operating system, but I think I like the new media player widgets best.

In the latest beta, if you load the multitasking interface you see a new set of widgets that sit in the dock to control iPod playback. The widgets include three buttons for track navigation (Play/Pause, Track Back, Track Forward), a shortcut to launch the iPod application, and a software orientation lock which serves the same function as the iPad’s hardware switch. Accessing the widgets is as simple as swiping left on the dock.

Very slick, but what interests me most is the possibility of further widget sets. If third-party developers can program their own widgets to control background apps from the dock, multitasking on iPhone OS 4.0 is just going to rock. Skype widgets anyone? My guess is that’s just what Apple has in mind, and the screen orientation lock will be the one standard icon

Cult of Mac reader Ian Chan was inspired by our recent story of a football player getting grounded after listening to his iPod during landing to pen the above comic on airplane safety.

Chan — along with everyone else who has forgotten to turn off a device on board — says:

“I might be overreacting, but perhaps you (the FAA) should worry more about your pilots making $17,000 a year and being on food stamps [warning, link to Michael Moore] than me listening to Miley Cyrus on my flight home.”

Word.

Via Ian Chan

New York Jets wide receiver Santonio Holmes created a flap on a flight from Newark to Pittsburgh by using his iPod during landing.

Authorities filed an “incident report” on Holmes — he was not formally charged with violating FAA regulations on the use of personal electronic devices (PEDs) during flight.

Holmes got off easy,  one unlucky iPhone user was detained after keeping the device in airplane mode.

Most laptops and portable media players have pretty terrible bass, no matter how great their audio may otherwise be, but subwoofers aren’t exactly easily luggable devices. Digivoid’s latest device attempts to shore up your iPod and MacBook’s weak vibes.

The Zo Personal Subwoofer is a small gadget about the size of an iPod Nano. All you do is plug it into your device’s headphone jack through a supplied mini-stereo cable. You then plug your headphones into the Zo for improved sound, which is itself powered by an internal rechargeable battery.

According to DigiZoid, the Zo Persona Subwoofer offers bass that’s the equivalent of a 12-inch subwoofer. That seems like a little bit of a stretch to us, but if you’re interested, you can pick up a Zo to supplement your iPod’s bass for just $99.

Today, Patently Apple revealed a whole slew of new multi-touch gestures that Apple might introduce in new products and software updates, most of which are detailed in the image above… which, incidentally, looks like the pictogram instruction set for the secret high five that was in vogue my senior year in high school, and which I could never pull off without the tendons in my wrist rolling up like a window shade.

Patently Apple’s post also indicates a neat new iPod technology which is unrelated, but plenty cool: automatic adjustment of music tempo based on your performance. For example, if you’re flagging on the hill, the tempo increases, while if your heart is about to explode, it slows on down. Looks like a smart evolution of Apple’s current Nike partnership to me.

The Horizontal 51 sound board from Finite Elemente isn’t just a shelf, it’s an iPod docking solution with integrated Surround Sound speakers with a 25WPC amplifier and a frequency range of 50 to 25,000Hz, as well as other available connections for TV, PCs and MP3 players. The shelf itself can support up to 25KG of weight, so if you don’t want to put plants or books on it, it can probably support the weight of a light HDTV. It’s an attractive solution, but $664 is a lot of money to spend on a shelf, no matter how many devices it can integrate with.

Apple’s perverse obsession with miniaturizing the iPod Shuffle doesn’t seem likely to stop until they bring it down to the size of a nanoangstrom, but one of the biggest drawbacks of making a music player smaller than the controls needed to use it is that the user interface needs to be offloaded to a peripheral: in the third generation iPod Shuffle’s case, the stock ear buds.

It’s a bad approach. The Shuffle was already small enough, and since ear buds tend to be easily damaged, it meant that anyone who owned a Shuffle who lost or damaged their stock ear buds would have to lay out for a replacement pair instead of just plugging in another set of cochleal cans.

From Apple, though, comes slightly encouraging news for third-gen Shuffle owners: they will replace your ear buds free of charge for up to two years if they stop working. Just call up Apple or drop by an Apple Store and they’ll send you off with a new pair of ear buds.

Personally, though, I’ll stick to my second gen Shuffle: an MP3 player the size of a box of matches (as opposed to the matches themselves) is plenty small enough for me already, thank you.

Interested in picking up an iPad but a couple of bills short? The electronics sweatshops of Shenzhen again come to the rescue with their own counterfeit iPads, completete with WiFi, Bluetooth, 4GB of storage and a cute, knock-off operating system skinned like OS X 10.0.

The company who makes them, Shenzhen Huayi, says their iPad looks like a giant iPhone… although I’m guessing he’s never seen one, since this is a big iPod if I ever saw one.

If you’re a collector of Apple knock-offs or just a poor SOB, the “iPad” can be yours for just $290, and it’ll be available on Saturday simultaneously with the release of the iPad proper.

[via Redmond Pie]

Keen computer collector Melissa Maloney has a lot of iPods. A LOT of iPods. And quite a few computers too, including an ancient Canon Cat.

I saw her stuff and wanted to ask her: Why do you have so many iPods? What’s the appeal of these old computers? So I did. And here’s what she said.

The New York Times this morning calls Tony Fadell the “godfather” of the iPod (he’s leaving Apple for greener pastures). But the title should probably go to Jon Rubinstein, the former head of Apple’s Mac and iPod divisions and now CEO of Palm.

The history of the iPod’s development is told here and here, but the short story is:

1. In late 2000, Steve Jobs asked his executive team to look at gadgets people were attaching to the Macs. Perhaps Apple could do a better job of designing them. Videocameras were an obvious candidate, but they were already pretty good. Jobs wasn’t sure Apple could do better. But early MP3 players were a different story — they were horrible.

2. Jon Rubinstein, the head of hardware, hired Tony Fadell to look into making some prototypes, but the project didn’t go into high gear until Toshiba showed Rubinstein a tiny 1.8-inch hard drive it had just developed. They had no idea what to do with it, but Rubinstein did.

3. Rubinstein called Jobs to tell him he’d found the perfect technology for an MP3 player, and he kept Fadell on to oversee the early protoypes. Fadell did such a good job, he went on to become head of the iPod division and eventually took Rubinstein’s job.

As Steven Levy says in his writeup of the iPod’s development, The Perfect Thing:

There is no single “father of the iPod.” Development was a multitrack process, with Fadell, now on staff, in charge of the actual workings of the device, Robbin heading the software and interface team, Jonathan Ive doing the industrial design, Rubenstein overseeing the project, and Jobs himself rubbernecking as only he could.

However, I give credit to Rubinstein, who was at the heart of the development process. He had the initial technological insight, put together the team to develop it, and led the charge to keep improving and updating the device. If there’s a godfather of the iPod, it’s Jon Rubinstein.

With the iPad mere days away, no one’s likely to evacuate their various collection sacks if a new version of iTunes supporting iPad syncing drops this week. It’s a certainty, and MacRumors has a round-up of features to expect.

According to MacRumors’ source, the biggest change will be to add a new “Books” section for managing e-books, which will fuse with the existing “Audiobooks” category. To make everything easy, iTunes will automatically detect whether you’ve got an iPad or iPhone connected, to eliminate confusion as to whether or not books can be synced to the device.

Some big changes are also coming to Genius Mixes, iTunes 9’s auto-generated playlists, and will allow for more nuanced user control including the ability to rename mixes and rearrange them by dragging and dropping, as well as delete any unwanted Genius Mixes.

Another improvement is that all iPods will now have the option to auto-covert the bitrates of digital audio files to 128kbps AAC in order to save space and fit more songs on a device.

Expect the 9.1 update no later than Friday.

After nine years, iPod co-creator Tony Fadell has opted to exit Apple to get a hand in “green” tech.

Fadell is credited with hatching the idea of a hard-drive-based digital music player in the 1990s.  He first took the concept to Real Networks, but left after just six weeks due to clashes with CEO Rob Glaser.

Fadell found fertile territory for the project at Apple, where he was the first member of its iPod hardware engineering team in 2001. Working with Jon Rubenstein, Michael Dhuey and Jonathan Ive in under a year, the iPod was born.  

Fadell was was promoted to vice president of iPod engineering in 2004, then named senior vice president of the iPod Division in April 2006.

His final exit isn’t that much of a surprise: Fadell stepped down from that position in 2008, staying on in an advisory role to Steve Jobs.

The forty-year-old Fadell kept mum about the motives behind his decision but told the New York Times that he was saying adios to Apple to advise companies and pursue private investments with a focus on green technology.

“My primary focus will be helping the environment by working with consumer green-tech companies,” he said. “I’m determined to tell my kids and grand kids amazing stories beyond my iPod and iPhone ones.”

Robert Gary Jones was enjoying a jog along on the beach with his iPod when a single-engine plane making an emergency landing hit him from behind, killing him instantly.

The 38-year-old father of two was on a business trip in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina when a Lancair IV-P aircraft lost its propeller and was “basically gliding” Monday evening before hitting Jones, coroner Ed Allen told AP.

“There’s no noise,” said aviation expert Mary Schiavo, a former inspector general for the National Transportation Safety Board. “So the jogger, with his ear buds in, and the plane without an engine, you’re basically a stealth aircraft. Who would expect to look up?”

Pilot Edward I. Smith and his passenger walked away from the crash landing near the Hilton Head Marriott Resort and Spa.

According to the Lancair web site, the airplane model that killed Jones is a four-seater that can reach speeds of up to 345 mph and is sold in kit that can “be easily built in one’s home shop,” with a final price tag estimated at $320,000 – $470,000.

Jones’ death is uncommon, but not unheard of: last year a Philadelphia jogger using an iPod died when a tree fell on her.

Hard to say whether volume control might have saved him, but it’s worth thinking about.

Via AP

This is the man-bites-dog of gadget crime: a mugger stuck a gun in the face of a 15-year-old demanding cash but just said no when offered an iPod instead.

It happened in Sydney, Australia, where police believe the attacker was another teen.

“[The boy] offered him an iPod but the attacker didn’t want that,” Green Valley Local Area Command duty officer, Inspector Siobhan Busetto told the Sydney Morning Herald. The attacker ran away, leaving the teen unharmed and still in possession of his mp3 player. Reports didn’t specify the iPod model involved in the scuffle.

For years, iPods have been at the center of countless robberies — and a few murder cases —  attesting to their cult status and steal-a-bility.

Is this a fluke or a sign that market penetration has been reached?

Perhaps the mugger was waiting for the iPad?

All gratuitous speculation welcome in the comments.

Design collective Quirky just launched this earbud detangler that looks like a pocket protector for the aughts.

Cute, colorful and just $5, Wrapster is made out of bendable rubber. It keeps your wires uncrossed when you’re wearing an iPod and stores them when you’re not.

Perhaps if nerds start wearing what look like 4-inch safety scissors in their front pockets, those annoying co-workers who waste their time with questions like “How do I clear cookies from Firefox?” will start running for cover.

Just a shade over nine years ago, Apple launched iTunes, a fairly late, fairly average MP3 player with CD burning built in. And though it lacked many of the features of Audion, then the best music player for Mac, it not only became the market leader, but it set the stage for the iPod, widespread legal music downloads, legal TV, the iPhone, and soon the iPad. It would be no exaggeration to say that iTunes saved Apple. It would be no exaggeration to say that iTunes is now Apple’s most successful piece of software ever in terms of users.

But it would also be no exaggeration to call it the worst piece of software Apple makes and the one thing that could disrupt Apple’s current march to mobile device dominance. It has bloated into a crashy kludge that the rest of the Apple universe depends upon. Despite a lot of good intentions from amazing software developers, iTunes has become Apple’s Internet Explorer 6 — an unmitigated disaster.

Police and fire officials were called when an iPod spontaneously exploded on the desk of a high school student in West Newbury, Massachusetts.

The iPod was sitting on the girl’s desk in science class when it exploded. No one was hurt and fire chief Scott Berkenbush said the situation proved to be minor.

“iPod is the new Toyota,” Berkenbush remarked to the Daily News Online. “I think the problem is with the battery itself. If any moisture gets on it or it falls in a puddle, it can spark.”

Unfortunately, the report doesn’t mention what iPod model — one of the older iPod nanos that have had battery problems — was or whether it was a school-issued iPod Touch that more and more schools are adopting for classroom work.

Via Daily News Online

Fashion designer Kosuke Tsumura wove old iPods, mice and keyboards into a series of artworks on show at Nanzuka Underground in Tokyo until March 20, Japan Trends reports.

We’ve seen a few artistic reincarnations of defunct iPods but love the way he’s turned that tangle of useless cables we all have in a drawer into something more: the work is intricate enough that it takes awhile to spot the NSFW element in at least one of them.

Just like my fascination with the bulbous iMac G3 series, I tend to be fascinated by the shapes of gadgets, and in my explorations at the local Berlin flea market, I have a habit of picking up delightfully non-conformist pieces of obscure and obsolete retro technology, never quite knowing what I’m going to do with them.

That’s why I love this guide over at Unplggd explaining how to convert a vintage 8-track player into an iPod speaker dock.

It’s not really very hard: all you do is take an 8-track cassette adapter, plug a regular cassette adapter into it, and plug in your iPod.

It’s intuitive, but not particularly ingenious or elegant. The real reason I’m delighted with this DIY, though, is because I just picked up almost that exact same 8-track player a couple of weeks ago, and now I can turn it into something more useful than an overly precious conversation piece. If you’re over 30 or 35, you’ve probably still got an 8-track player just like this in your garage: do some digging, and you’ll probably find that you can do the same.

British thieves have realized it’s more profitable to snatch the iPhone from your hand than risk breaking into your home for a no-name DVD player.

Ten years ago, there were an estimated 1.28 million domestic burglaries in England and Wales, according to the British Crime Survey (BCS).   By, 2008/09 that number had fallen to 744,000 burglaries.

The drop, one researcher says,  is due to expensive portable gadgets and cheap home electronics.

“While DVD players for example, got cheaper, certain consumer items became smaller and were very, very expensive and sought after,” said James Treadwell, a lecturer at the University of Leicester’s Department of Criminology.  So the latest mobile phone, or the latest iPod, which people carry about them, have become targets for robbers.”

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JXRy8hO8g0&feature=player_embedded

One of the things that’s easy to forget before every big Apple event is that even the vast majority of Apple employees, including people organizing the event, don’t know what Steve Jobs is going to unveil.

This Bloomberg interview with former Apple Senior Systems Engineer Edward Eigerman describes exactly what it’s like to go to an Apple event as an employee without having any more clue than the rest of us what the company has planned.

It’s definitely an interesting watch: Eigerman describes his own experience being a senior executive at Apple and literally having no knowledge of what the iPod would be like up to ninety minutes before it was announced. He says that internally, Apple employees are just as excited about product launches as the rest of us, and follow all the same rumor sites.

But there’s a more negative side to the internal secrecy: Eigerman claims that paranoia is common within Apple, since people worry they might “know too much” about products they aren’t meant to know about.

Eigerman’s an interesting mouth piece for this, since by his own admission, he was fired by Apple for accidentally giving an Apple client a piece of software a week before release. “If Apple finds out” you’re violating their intellectual property policies, intentionally or not, Eigerman says “there’s no turning back.”

[via 9to5Mac]

Online police reports always turn up a few interesting tidbits. Here’s one from the roster of misdeeds that took place in Elyria, Ohio on January 11:

1:46 p.m. – 3300 block Livingston Ave., iPod Touch reported stolen during a party; also, someone is using victim’s iTunes account to download songs.

My first thought: dumb thief. My second: maybe not, if they don’t keep it up for very long.

As an iTunes account holder abroad with a US credit card, I’ve managed to get locked out of my own iTunes account (shockingly simple to do, time consuming to set right again) and there are a few tales of hacked iTunes accounts with fraudulent credit card charges that took a few rounds with Apple to get straightened out. (If it happens — first step: contact your credit card company).

Thieves have been caught using emailing photos from stolen iPhones and using iPods with the victim’s playlist, but what’s the chance police might  track down the unlawful downloader via an iPod Touch?

Via The Chronicle Telegram

This video is all over Twitter this morning, and you can see why.

Never mind a rotating Lego iPhone dock – here’s one with added steering wheel, so you can use it to play all your fave tilt-to-steer racing games.

Expect crappy plastic versions of this to appear pretty much everywhere in the coming months, all of them priced 20 bucks and none of them any good. If you really want one, build your own.

Inspired.

LAS VEGAS — The iTamtam is perhaps the strangest iPod dock yet conceived — but also the most practical. It’s a sturdy iPod speaker that doubles as a stool. It is based on a famous stool from the sixties that’s now featured in the Museum of Modern Art.

“It’s a speaker you can sit on,” said Patrick Parma, a spokesman for Branex Design, the Parisian firm that holds the rights for the Tam Tam stool.

The seat was updated as a speaker for its 40th anniversary. Called the iTamtam, the speaker/stool has an iPod/iPhone dock on top and a pair of 25-watt speakers built under the seat.

Apple’s iPod earbuds are the next earring, says Deos, a New York jewelery company which makes crystal covers for the ubiquitous white earbuds.

“Coming from the fashion business, we asked ourselves: ‘What is the next earring?” said Deos partner Charles Siebenberg.

“This is the next earring,” he said, holding up a pair of white earbuds.

Encrusted in Swarovski Crystals, the $98 earbud covers snap right on the earbud speaker housing. Each pair has more than 200 Swarovski Elements and is available in solid colors, floating colors (gradient mixed) and patterns.

As well as Swarovski crystals, the company also sells covers with Swarovski Crystal cuffs, and covers made from diamond and titanium, aluminum, and sports silicone.