Dylan Hunter

A long time coming, glad to hear it’s finally here, (ok, almost here - the site was down when I went on). Also does definitely open up another whole series of potential apps for other companies to build up from, (is one of the things that really is so foolish about proprietary apps without API’s / docs for folks to build and extend - the more folks build _on_ your product, the more they _use_ your product).

For those family-friendly folks in the audience, please ignore the last, entirely unnecessary question… More.

Now this is awesome news - not only in the functionality itself, (which is awesome enough by itself - can you tell that I’ve been salivating for a Tivo for several years now! ) but in that it’s the first sizeable / useful player*1* who’s writing software to use the iPod the way it should be, while concurrently sidestepping Apple’s currently restrictive role toward innovation in terms of what kinds of software, etc. can be used on / with the iPod. Though they did a truly beautiful job on the physical design of the player, there are many things I’d like to be able to differently with both the firmware*2* and iTunes, being specifically built to keep me from doing some of the things that I’d like to, (i.e. move files from the iPod back to the PC, even those files are legally mine) is, by definition, stunting.

Enough blathering, though. The rest of the release is here.

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*1* No disrespect to iPodder at all - I still use it to this day, as I find it much more powerful / useful than iTunes’ treatment of Podcasts, (with the exception of the “keep only the most recent option in iTunes, which I would love to have in iPodder, as well). Unfortunately, once iTunes sucked in Podcasts, iPodder, as an open source project, has effectively just rolled over into obscurity, putting the prime method of interfacing with the iPod back into Apple’s hands, which, even if I like Apple, allows their sole calls to limit what can and can’t be done with something that yes, they developed, but in its potential impact, really should have, (and hopefully still will) move well beyond them. TiVo, of course, has both the economic incentive and power to build, maintain and hopefully further excite more-than-Apple innovation on these kind of mobile devices.

*2* Most notably, modify the nature of how the directory structure functions as makes best sense to me. Though it’s definitely a very nice first shot, I hate not being able to modify to be easier for me. In addition, there is so much potential for the iPod to be used as an interface for a whole series of apps, but can’t do those, either, the way Apple has it set up.

Ok, so I’m 2 yrs after when the guy wrote this - still new info to me, and am sure to others, (and yes, also works with PC’s).

Also, on another iPod-related note that was certainly true as of early this year, (not sure if Apple’s fixed - probably not) for any new iPod folks on Windows, if you’re having problems syncing your iPod to a networked drive,*1* make sure that you don’t have any networked drives mapped as an E drive. For some reason, the iPod is hardcoded to become the E drive on Windows, (at least on XP) and if you have a networked drive pre-assigned as E, you’ll find that iTunes will simply sync your source with whatever harddrive you have mapped as E, rather than to your iPod, (i.e. I couldn’t, for the life of me, figure out why iTunes kept creating 2nd copies of all my music on the harddrive that they were on in the first place, and couldn’t find anything about it on the web, so here it is! ).

Simple fix - unmap your current E drive, dock the iPod, (you’ll see it’ll take over the E assignment) and then just re-map your former E drive to another letter, and you should be fine.

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*1* I.e. I keep all my music, etc. on my desktop downstairs, which has turned into a glorified file and print server.