Andrew’s Mac Tips Weblog

Mmm. Well. I was kind of right about the nano, totally wrong about iTunes and missed the Touch thing altogether. The best news, and it’s kind of hidden away, is that there are new headphones with remote controls for volume, skipping, pausing and making voice notes.

The Touch now has a real speaker built in, instead of a piezo beeper speaker, so that makes the countdown timer and alarm imminently more useful; should be good for listening to podcasts un-tethered as well.

The Classic line has been reduced to one model, as thin as the 80 gig, but with 120 gigs capacity. Perhaps that same drive will go in the MacBook Air, giving it a 50% boost in capacity.

I’m always a little nervous when it comes to OS updates. On the one hand it’s always nice to be up to date, but on the other, why risk breaking something that’s so stable in its current state.

When I looked at the specs of the 10.4.11 update the list of fixes looked very arcane, and not particularly exciting or relevant to my situation. But there also was included the final and supposedly stable version of Safari 3; and this was the only way to get a hold of it. I bit the bullet, induced by the prospect of exploring the new Safari.

I installed the upgrade and had no problems at all with the OS side of things; it was Safari itself that caused what grief I had. None of my SIMBL driven hacks liked it; several keyboard shortcuts had been changed — screwing up some of my Butler macros, and to me, it seems slower. Worse still, it was now here to stay (shades of the whole Microsoft IE embedded into the Windows OS brouhaha, but that’s another story).

This is the price one pays for tinkering, I guess. I don’t mean tinkering as in doing the upgrade; I mean tinkering as in having a pimped Safari to be upgraded. When I think back on all the software platforms I’ve used, PC, Mac and handheld, there was always some third party add-on that made each one “just so.”

Speaking of upgrades, have you noticed that Apple is more and more in the habit of adding some gift with each one? All of the iPhone and Touch updates, and the latest revisions to iTunes, have been primarily designed to stomp the latest hack, but they all add some new cool functionality that (probably) should have been there all along.

A new Apple reseller opened a shop in my local shopping mall. Unlike most of the department stores that sell Apple products here, this one was modeled loosely on proper American Apple Stores. The fittings were pristine and elegant, the sales people were friendly and not pushy, and best of all — I could play with the products as much as I liked.

So this was my first real hands-on look at the iPod Touch. It was almost uncanny; I’d read so much about it, and the similar iPhone, and seen so many demo movies, that when I did get to play it was being re-united with an old friend.

I tapped and swiped and pinched my way around the interface and found that, just as Andy Ihnatko had said, it all seemed so totally seamless – and obvious. I appear to have a lot of luck with hand held devices: the keyboard worked like a charm for me. I hammered away two-thumbed in the Notes section of a contact, completing a whole paragraph before glancing up at my handiwork.

There were only two errors. Incredible.

That’s it: I’m officially in love. It’s that “Seeing the 128k original Mac for the first time and realizing that this is the future” moment all over again.

I just installed this Service on the Mac and selected a lengthy article of text and used the service to create a new contact.

The new contact appeared in Address Book as No Name and the notes field was filled with the text. This could be a great way to take your reading material with you and access it (and edit it) using the iPod Touch.

That’s not its primary purpose of course. To quote the developers:

ContactCreator is a service that will take whatever text you have selected and make an contact in your AddressBook from it. If it’s only one word you have selected, it will automagically dump the word in the first name field of your new contact. If it’s two words, it will automagically dump the two words in the first and last name fields of your new contact. If it’s more than two, it will dump the whole lot in the Notes field of your new contact (which doesn’t have a name). It will also guess that word with an ‘@’ symbol in them are email addresses.

ContactCreator.service 1.2 software download - Mac OS X - VersionTracker

I go into the local department store where the iPod Touch is finally in stock. I ask the salesman if I can handle one and we head towards a Chinese salesman showing the only demo unit to a couple of other Asians. We ask if we can look on as he demos the unit and the three Chinese huddle together and hide the iPod from us — all the time glaring at us like we’ve got the plague or something.

I cross the street where there’s another department store with a Touch in a glass cabinet. I ask if I can handle it before buying. I need to know if it can do a couple of crucial things that are not mentioned in the manual. He says I can’t touch it, only buy it (in broken English). I argue that the selling point of the Touch is what happens when you touch it. How will I know if I want it without touching it first?

This goes right over his head.

I’m now back home, Touchless and none-the-wiser. Effing local Apple resellers…

I suddenly like the idea of an iPod Touch at my side. I think it would make the coolest notepad, ever.

I hate paper. Whatever I write on paper it gets transcribed to my Mac at some stage anyway so why not write once and let automation do its thing? I’ve tried so called hipster PDAs, and plain old paper pads, but they are so last century.

Right now I am writing this on my Dell Pocket PC and that’s fine and good, but even after years and years of using a stylus on a soft plastic screen, there’s always that nagging fear at the back of my mind that a particle of grit is going to find its way onto the screen and get dragged by the nib — leaving a scratch. It’s a real shiver down the spine feeling that once experienced you never want to repeat.

The screen of the Dell is flawless, but there’s always that fear. So, turning our attention to the iPod Touch, it has a glass screen and the input method is my squishy thumbs. I could hammer away for hours, during a dust storm if need be.

This is huge.

Yes, I know there is no Notes app on the Touch. It does have Contacts though, and new contacts can be created and synced back to the Address Book on the Mac. Those contacts have a Notes field and that’s where the “Think outside the box” killer app resides. I will of course need to try out this theory on a demo Touch to see if it all actually works as hoped. If it does then hello ultimate notepad. Oh, and it also includes music, movies and Safari…

YouTube - Create an offline To-Do list on your iTouch