Sorry for the long stretch o’ nothin’ between posts here. As you may have heard, Apple released a whole bunch of new iPods last month and for us in Missing Manual Land, that’s a cue to get cracking on a new edition. And we have.
iPod: The Missing Manual, Sixth Edition is off to the printer and will be out in stores soon. In the meantime, here are a few tidbits gleaned from doing this new version of the book.
Quicker naps for your iPod. There’s a quick way to put your iPod Classic or Nano to sleep with one quick tap now—without having to hold down Play/Pause. You can add a "Sleep" option right on your iPod’s main menu. To do so, go to iPod -> Settings -> Main Menu and scroll down toward the bottom of the list. Select "Sleep" and press the center button to add it to your iPod’s main menu, where you can select it anytime you want the iPod to take a nap and save its battery power for later.
Fetching missing album art. Cover Flow on the new iPods makes your music look great, but you get a bunch of gray, generic covers if you don’t have the actual album artwork embedded in your song files. You can make iTunes get it for you by choosing Advanced -> Get Album Artwork. Odds are iTunes can find a lot of your missing art, but if it can’t, it pops up a message telling you it didn’t find everything. But here’s the handy part — it tells you which ones it couldn’t find when you expand the bottom of the alert message. With this shopping list in hand, you can head over to Amazon and snag the missing image files yourself by searching for the album name. Once you see an image on screen, drag it off the Amazon Web page to your desktop — and then into the empty artwork window for that song in iTunes.
Roll your own iQuiz. After you’ve answered all the questions in the iQuiz game on your Classic or Nano, take a stroll to http://www.iquizmaker.com, where you can get Aspyr Media’s free software to either make up your own quizzes for the iPod — or load news ones other people have already made.
Quick zoom in Safari. Wi-Fi on the iPod Touch makes for speedy surfing, but all that pinching and spreading to zoom in on Web pages may wear your fingers out. Here’s a shortcut: just double-tap on the part of the page you want to see up close; the Safari browser zooms in to the spot for you.
Widget substitutes for the Touch. Touch owners may gripe that their iPods lack the stocks and weather widgets of Cousin iPhone. But with the many Web applications programmers have whipped up in the past few months, you can find weather, stocks, and more with just a few extra taps. To get there, point the Touch’s Safari browser to sites like mockdock.com or iphoneappsmanager.com.
