My beautiful iPhone

[alicebentley]

Last month I bought one of those snazzy new iPhones. Overall, I've been very pleased with it.

One interesting aspect is that it does *so* many things so very well, that I have a tendency to instead focus on the few things it does not do. For instance, it does a fine job of downloading webpages, quickly letting you move around the page or do a two-finger zoom. But there's no way to save a copy of the page. A real bother if you don't want to have to fetch the page image every time you look at it.

The iPhone does a few things that I don't need at all. Like stocks, and YouTube.
It doesn't do a few things that I would have thought easy, like store or view jpgs, or ebooks.

And there are still a few interface issues - like Audiobooks are a built-in option to the iPod section, but I have yet to find any way to get audiobook files into that section. I can still listen to them, but they're stored along with all the music files. So don't hit "all songs on shuffle" unless you want a really odd experience.

Now, some iPhone linkage!

For those of us who delight in destruction, the age-old question: "Will it blend?"
http://www.willitblend.com/videos.aspx?type=unsafe&video=iphone

Nicely done video of some of iPhone's hidden features. Sorta.
http://www.break.com/index/iphone-hidden-features.html

Comments

[ericcoleman]

That is about the only problem I have with I-Stuff, that you can't put stuff into separate areas and you can't his shuffle within playlists. That is about the only problem I have though.

[alicebentley]

The iPhone *does* allow you to shuffle within a playlist. I just have to avoid that ol' On-The-Go (everything) option.

[ericcoleman]

oooh ... if I didn't already have a phone ... no ... no ... bad thought ...

[whl.livejournal.com]

The Audio books being in the shuffle is a bit odd; were they true audio books, or sound files that happen to be books?

The iPod (and iPhone is not really the management interface for its contents; that's iTunes.

In iTunes, if you click on 1 track (or a bunch of them), and hit command-i, a dialog box comes up. You want the tab labeled "Options"; in there, you can select to exempt tracks from Shuffle, make them remember where you leave off playing them (vital with my Midnight Special captures), and even set a offset into them as the starting point (if you have NPR podcasts and want to skip the funding credits.)

Things stored in the audio books section of iTunes are automatically exempt from shuffling, I think.

I don't have an iPhone, and the only one I ever saw was at the picnic, but this is how it works with a regular iPod.

For eBooks, there isn't a popular enough standard. On the iPod, you can take text files, and put them in the notes section. The screen on mine to short enough that I had to keep scrolling all the time as I read, so I gave that up. My Palm TX is somewhat better for that. For the limitations of the Notes format, see this (http://www.macworld.com/2004/09/secrets/septgeekfactor/index.php), and .

I have not seen anyone discuss the notes feature on the iPhone, so it might not be there. On regular iPods, it uses disk mode, which I think the iPhone is lacking (at least, unhacked.)

None of my iPods are photo or video capable, but I know there is a way to get images (possibly only from iPhoto) into those iPods.

[whl.livejournal.com]

Ok, it looks like in the iTunes interface, there is a tab when the iPhone is selected in the list on the left hand side, for photos, and you can choose a folder to sync to the iPhone, or use the iPhoto or Aperture image libraries.

So that should take care of jpegs, I'd think, unless you wanted to save them off the web.

Where do images taken with the built-in camera end up?

Yes, it is unfortunate that Apple left a lot of local type capabilities out of the iPhone: local file storage, saving things to it, etc. For that matter, I'd like to see copy and paste put back someday.

[whl.livejournal.com]

For eBooks, assuming they are in a non-DRM, non-compressed form (or maybe even then, if they are PDFs), it looks like attaching them to an email and sending it to the account on the iPhone would work (although it might cost a bit of money.)

Apple says: iPhone supports the following email attachment file formats: .c, .cpp, .diff, .doc, .docx, .h, .hpp, .htm, .html, .m, .mm, .patch, .pdf, .txt, .xls, .xlsx

What I find interesting there is that it omits .rtf, the format the Apple tried to get all Mac OS X users to use instead of any other styled text format, through TextEdit.

All of which is saying to me that this is a 1.0 product. They promise that the formats accepted will increase after Mac OS 10.5 ships, I think.

[alicebentley]

"Apple says: iPhone supports the following email attachment file formats: .c, .cpp, .diff, .doc, .docx, .h, .hpp, .htm, .html, .m, .mm, .patch, .pdf, .txt, .xls, .xlsx"

Perhaps the new update (this morning) will have changed some things, but earlier trying to attach any file to an email crashed the system.

Pictures taken with the iPhone transfer back to the Photo section easily. Some few other photos have transferred as well. Everything else I've tried, including the jpgs I was most interested in having with me, just would not show up. At least trying to load them didn't crash anything.

I'm sure the iPhone can do a lot more than I've asked it to - but I haven't spent that much time just trying things, or pushing its boundaries. At least, no matter how badly it gets munged, I can always just go back to Factory Settings and reload the data I need.

[chantry.livejournal.com]

In addition to whl's fine advice, let me just add that if the audiobook files have "audiobook" set as the genre, they should automatically be skipped when you shuffle all songs, so that's something you might check, and set if necessary.

[alicebentley]

I really haven't found it to be a problem. It just seemed curious to me that they went to the effort of making a special Audiobooks section, but actually getting audiobook in there is a challenge.

I'll be quick to point out that I have little experience with audio in general, and haven't really spent the time to try a lot of options.

And today's not going to be a day where I can play with it much either.... Back to housework!