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8 Things That Baffle Me About My iPod Touch

I’ve been an iPod Touch owner since Christmas and I’ve been very happy.  However, there are still a few things that I just don’t quite get.  Maybe someone can help explain.

  1. Coverflow – It’s a really sweet feature, but the album art seems to only match the song that was playing when Coverflow as activated.  It doesn’t seem to update when the song changes.  Why not?
  2. Google Search – Google has a great iPhone friendly versions of Google Search, yet Safari’s built in search doesn’t use it on my iPod.  It sends you to the regular Google Search results instead, which are hard to read.
  3. Background – Setting the background is great, however it’s not really the background now is it?  It’d be nice to actually set the background behind my home screen and not just on the unlock screen.  Granted, there may be a few readability issues, but I’d at least like to try.
  4. Notes – In MacOSX, the notes application comes along with a to-do list.  Not on the iPod Touch though.  I’d LOVE a checklist application for shopping so I can just check things off as I get them.  Super Target doesn’t have Wi-Fi so a web application isn’t going to work.
  5. Sideways – Why can’t everything go sideways?  Safari can do it, and so can music and YouTube, but not the calendar or emal or a few other applications.  When I first got my iPod, I kept turning everything only to be disappointed.  It’d be nice to at least have Mail.app work sideways as it’s much easier to type that way.
  6. Shuffle – On my old iPod, I could set it to shuffle, then choose a playlist, and a song, and it’d start with that sone and shuffle everything else in the playlist; regardless of where I started.  Now, I can hit shuffle and it’ll shuffle everything in the playlist, however, if I pick a song, it will only play from that song to the end of the playlist.  No shuffling.
  7. Help – There seems to be no help application on the iPod.  Yes, the iPod Touch/iPhone is extremely easy to use, but things did get moved around.  It took me weeks to figure out how to rate a song.  And double clicking on the home button is a great trick, once you figure it out.  What else am I missing?
  8. Web Apps Site – Did you know that Apple has a great listing of web apps for the iPod Touch?  Did you also know that it comes automatically bookmarked on your iPod?  And that it’s not optimized for the iPod?!  Wouldn’t it be smart to create an optimized version for those trying to find new apps and browsing directly from the iPod/iPhone?
I’ll admit, the items above are not earth shattering, they are just a few things that seem a bit odd to me.  Maybe updates will come as the iPod OS continues to mature, or maybe I’ll just get use to them and forget them all.  But, if you’re listening Apple, there are a few quick and easy fixes up there. Especially that Google Search.

 


6 Responses

  1. Laurence says:

    The iPod Touch design looks fantastic, but as you pointed out, there are still a few things that could be corrected. I have a Nano that works perfectly, but I’m envying the tactile screen and the nice icons of the Touch… except for the fingerprints marks on the screen. I wanted to show you a theme I made that is based on your IpoxRemix theme: https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/7033
    I thought the creator might be interested to see what others have made from his tutorial 🙂

  2. Gulvvarme says:

    I totally agree!!

  3. adamap says:

    I can’t wait to get one and run into these issues.

  4. What’s an ipod?

    Kidding!

    @twistermc: Man, you would think with all that revenue and staffing in industrial design and interaction design that apple would not have to have individuals using their products point out their obvious flaws. I, hereby, vote that Thomas receive a check for $1,000,000.00 and a grand of $24,000,000.00 to properly correct the issues listed above and then he gets free apple products for life.

    End of story!

    and because I’m doing this for you, I get a 3% cut of everything from here out 🙂 haha. Great article man — word.

  5. Great post! I find myself having the same beefs with mine!

  6. Thomas says:

    Still, I could not live without it. 🙂

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