A Day in Paradise

OK people – mark you calendars as this is possibly the one rant that I will do on how incredibly awesome an Apple product is.

I’ve had my first gen ipod touch for about a year and a half now. The two main things that I do with my ipod are Audio books and Podcasts, and the lack of over-the-air podcast download in the original firmware lead me to hacking it right away and installing a better podcatching client.

When the v2 software came out, I reluctantly wiped out my ipod and paid the $9.99 to install the upgrade that now had over-the-air podcast downloading. It was pretty much broken, and really didn’t work that well, but the app store and the other cool new features were enough to keep me from hacking it back to 1.1.x.

My main problem with v2 was how difficult it was to listen to audio books. If you were distracted and needed to go back a couple minutes it was virtually impossible to find your place with the cumbersome interface. The other problem I have (this hasn’t been fixed) is that when you sync your ipod it stops the playback and then doesn’t store any information for where to pick it back up again. Since I listen to a lot at my desk, I end up getting disconnected at least a couple times a day. This only happens with Podcasts, not audible.com books (because they have proprietary technology in their format that keeps it’s place.

Anyway, while listening to TWiT and hearing about the new “scrubbing” feature, I figure that it’s probably worth yet another $9.99 download.

It TOTALLY is!!!

1. The new search is awesome. Click once on the button and you pull up a search which searches through everything on your ipod, music, contacts, emails, everything. Very impressive. You can also access it by swiping one screen to the left of your home screen.

2. Scrubbing is AWESOME. Here is how it works: first of all you can hear the playback as you’re scrubbing through it. If you hold your thumb on the timeline and scrub one way or the other it goes just as fast as v2. The great thing is that if you pull your thumb down horizontally the timeline slows down. So what you do is move your thumb to the general place you were, then pull your thumb down to slow down the speed of the scrubbing and find your exact position. It’s a bit hard to describe but it works VERY well.

3. Speed up & Slow down. I am a fast reader, faster than people who read my audio books so having a button that says 2x right on the screen is a GREAT way to speed the reading up to my comfort level. They are using some sort of pitch shifting technology so the voice gets shifted down to the same pitch as standard speed. It takes a few seconds to get used to the readers voice once you make him talk twice as fast, however once you get used to it you don’t notice it AT ALL. I tried listening to TWiT in 2x – it didn’t work very well probably better when there is just one speaker and yo udon’t have to adjust to multiple voices.

4. And finally the 30-second back button. This is the simplest and the best little button to have, and because I know I can jump back 30 seconds, I find myself more likely “pick up” my audio book when I just have a couple minutes to “read”. I have to say the icon is a bit ugly and makes the music screen look “cluttered”.

All in all, I feel like this version of the OS finally feels like a really usable platform.