All Your Podcasts in a Row
Ahem. It turns out that a much easier way to get around the following problem is to just upgrade to iPhone OS 2.1. Because these days audio podcasts just keep playing nicely like they should. Still, you can go ahead and do the following if you’d like to. You know, for fun.
One of my irritations with the iPhone, which I forgot to mention before, was with audio podcasts. On a normal iPod, if you play the first of a bunch of audio podcasts, at the end, it will continue on to the next, and so forth
On an iPhone however, it’ll just stop. This is a pain if you’ve got a whole boodle of Onion Radio News or triple j new music to get through.
The solution is easy: make a smart playlist in iTunes for tracks which both:
- Are part of your troublesome audio podcast — matching the artist is probably easiest. And,
- Have a play count of 0.1
Sync this playlist to your iPhone and when you play it, there’ll be no irritating stoppages. It’s possible this only irritated me, but I thought I’d mention it on the off-chance.
Next time; I promise not to talk about iPhones. No, really.
- This step is by no means necessary if you like having every single episode of a podcast on your iPhone. ↩
iPhonic
Well, we’re about a month into having an iPhone now. It’s time to do a spot of reviewing. After all this build-up, is the iPhone actually a good phone? Does it suck in places? Which places? First — the good stuff.
- It’s the first phone I’ve had which allows me to make my own ringtones, out of any audio file I have to hand. After years of never touching Garage Band, suddenly we’re best mates.
- It has 16 icons visible on the home screen. That’s 7 more than any phone I’ve used in the past. Result!
- The App Store. No wandering around the internet, finding dodgy looking programs and nervously sending them by bluetooth to my phone. Oh, the joy. In a related vein:
- 2 Across. The Age crosswords… on the train! 2 Across, by Eliza Block is $7.99 AU and worth every cent. There’s also the slightly more expensive Crosswords, which cunningly insists on showing you the keyboard at all times. This is probably good for geniuses, but as I spend most of my time with crosswords pondering, I prefer the 2 Across style. Crossword’s keyboard is also a squished-up tiny one, which makes noises when you type, even if you’ve told your phone not to do that. And also it’s ugly. I suspect most of my issues with Crosswords stem from it being a port from the Palm OS.
- It will auto-correct your words including accents. For example, the other day it corrected curacao to curaçao. Awesome. Well, awesome on some levels.
But there are downsides to the iPhone, too. I occasionally miss being able to hit a green button whenever I’m looking at something even vaguely about a contact in order to call them. I can’t copy and paste text of course. I’d settle for being able to insert the contents of my “Notes” into proper textareas while browsing. And what the hell is up with those notes anyway? Why don’t they sync with Mail’s notes? It’s not like they look and function EXACTLY THE SAME or anything. I know many have expressed these frustrations, but it doesn’t make them any less annoying. The only redeeming feature of the Notes app is that you can email them.
In other annoyances, the Contacts app — surely a simple sort of thing — quite often hangs after you launch it. Or rather, it did before iPhone OS 2.0.1 was released. Well played, Apple.
Having to wait for Apple to approve updates to software is occasionally frustrating, too, though from a user point of view, it’s easily solved by the developers not telling us about their awesome updates before that approval comes. When you actually update an app, it gets wrenched back to your first home screen, regardless of where you happened to have it filed away.
These are niggles though. My biggest beef with the iPhone, perhaps predictably, came not from Apple but from Optus. While the service had been excellent, my initial bill was unexpectedly $123 and not $66, as I had expected.1 It turned out that I had impressively managed to download 200mb of data in my first five days, and that those five were in Optus’s eyes, part of a pro-rated month, where my download limit was around 80mb. When I pointed out to the sales assistant that my first month was supposed to have unlimited data, he pointed out that in the terms of service, the “first month” didn’t start until two weeks into the contract. I pointed out that the person selling it to me had specifically told me otherwise, and he kindly refunded me — take note, hapless Optus customers.
- $59 cap, plus $7 a month payments for the iPhone. ↩
And now, five things to improve the Wii
Like condoms during the Olympics, Nintendo’s console is in great demand. This seems to be because the console is the cheapest of the current generation, rather than anything spectacular about the console. I was going to use this blog to complain about the Wii, specifically its name, the amount of shovelware on the console and waggle being the new button mashing, but I’ve decided to be more positive, so here are five things the Wii should be able to do:
Guns. The Wii has a controller that points at the screen. Light guns point at the screen. So why are there no decent games or light guns for the Wii? Part of the trouble is with the Wii remote’s odd design — the buttons are in the wrong place so a new peripheral is needed, but surely if Duck Hunt could be made for the NES, then a decent game can be made for the Wii. Seems like an easy way to sell a lot of games.
Swords. The Wii knows where the controller is pointing and how it moves so it could be used as a sword. I don’t mean like in Red Steel where there are three possible moves — I want my character in the game to do exactly as I do with the remote. I want the game to teach me actual sword fighting moves. And I want to use a lightsaber.
Autostart. If I want to play a game on my 360, I turn it on. It starts up, starts the game and logs in, all by itself. To play a game on the Wii, I have to press A for the safety warning, point the remote at the screen, press A to select what I want and then press A again to confirm that I didn’t retardedly select the wrong thing. Then I get told not whack anything with the remote and to use the safety grip and the wrist strap. It takes about half an hour just to weigh myself on the Wii Fit. Speaking of interface problems, it’d be nice to be able to use a classic controller on the menu screen, or have the weather and news already loaded with Connect24.
Accurate pointing. The Wii lacks a way to callibrate the remote, so there’s no way that the onscreen pointer will be pointing at the place you are pointing at. It’s a laugh to see people new to the Wii expect the Wii to be able to know what they’re actually pointing at.
Connectivity. I know after that after Nintendo’s constant fascination with connecting the gamecube and the gameboy, everyone’s sick of the idea, but given that my house is already full of DSs and Wiis and that no extra cables would be needed, it be pretty cool to be able to play games that use both, or send games to the DS that have been downloaded from the Wii, like Nintendo said they would do two years ago.
iPhone Day
Is there anything more shaming than standing in queue for a phone? Well, yes. But as I’ve never been caught in a Nazi-themed sex orgy, this might have been near the top of the scale for me.
Apparently, the Optus store in Southland was opening at 8.00 am. Australians are lazy, I thought, and so I turned up at 7.30. Disappointingly, there was a queue of about 20 people. Even more disappointingly, the staff soon came out to the queue to inform us that there were no black 16 gb iPhones available. Well, I thought, I’ll just order a black one. I can wait.
After an hour of this ‘waiting’ thing — which might not have taken so long if Optus’ ordering system hadn’t broken down twice — my resistance to white had considerably evaporated. Some bloke had shown off his white one, and of looked quote nice. I used to like white things… It doesn’t look too shabby… I’ll never see the back anyhow… It was just as I was starting to convince myself that I’d happily take the white one that one of the Optus staff came out to inform us that there were only four of them left. There were five people in front of me. Sadly I bemoaned that even with a deposit I wouldn’t manage to get a phone.
“I don’t have a deposit.”
As it turned out, almost NO ONE had a deposit, making my opening gambit of not immediately asking “Who’s got a deposit” when I lined up particularly galling. Luckily, I had a few other queue members with deposits on my side, and we formed an alliance of sorts to beat the people in front of us to the 16gb phones. It was at this point that I started to feel like I was on a particularly nerdy version of Survivor. “They’ve been asking about deposits all day,” lies one hapless competitor.1 I make a mental note to kill her with whichever app on the iPhone decapitates people and makes it look like an accident.
Our new, smaller queue is formed, and I try not to make eye contact with those we’ve left behind. Mercifully we’re soon allowed in, and I’m given my phone. I open up my old phone to get the SIM card out, and blow dust all over the helpful customer service girl. It’s how we say “thank you” on my planet.
It’s a good little iPhone, too. People whinge about the keyboard, but as someone who never got the hang of T9, I’m light years faster than I used to be. The browsing is nifty, except when websites make their crappy “mobile” versions of sites which don’t offer all the capabilities of the real site.2 The second I need to actually go somewhere interesting, the Maps will be awesome. And the Facebook app is nifty, as one expects from something made by Joe ‘Firebug’ Hewitt.3
I finally have the One True Video iPod. All is right with the world.