There are some nice little touches tucked away in the iPod app that I’m really liking. Specifically, a few new features for podcasts and audiobooks. You can boost or slow the speed by tapping on the new speed button on the right. It rotates through 0.5x, 1x and 2x.That’s going to go a long way to helping me get through my backlog of podcasts. There’s just too much interesting content out there to consume in the limited amount of time that I have available. My only quibble is that 2X can be just a tiny bit too fast for some speakers and an option to do 1.5x would be appreciated, although not critical.
The quick rollback is useful for when something interesting comes up in a podcast and you want to make a note. Tap the 30s rewind button, pop out to the home screen and open up a note or an email message and you can note the information as it goes by - another example where the 0.5 speed is really useful. Trying to note long URLs being dictated in a podcast can be a pain, and often, this happens while I’m in the train without a physical notepad easily available. Yup, I’m looking at you MacBreak Weekly Picks of the Week…
My other happy find was actually sent to me directly as Apple closed out my bug (radar://6409984) with smart playlists. Before, if you played back your podcasts from inside a smart playlist rather than the Podcast section of the iPod app, the play count wasn’t incremented and they didn’t autoupdate the smart playlist.
This is a great way to keep stuff in order and up to date. Start at the top of this playlist and you’ll be going through all of your podcasts from all sources in the order that they were posted. As you run through them, they drop off of the list so you don’t need to go checking in each individual podcast list for the latest episodes.
I am however, puzzled by the little envelope icon, as I tap on it and nothing happens. Logically it would let me send a link to the podcast to someone, but the code didn’t get finished on time. Expect a 3.0.1 shortly :-)
Update - the other subtle thing is the new dynamic scrubbing speed. By scrubbig with your finger on or near the bar you are in high speed mode, but with little possibility of fine tune control. By moving your finger down into the almbum art area while moving left and right you can slow the scrub speed, allowing you to precisely navigate to a particular spot in the track very accurately. It’s not a virtual click-wheel, but it works just as well.
Update 2 - the envelope does work for some podcasts, but I haven’t yet been able to determine the criteria for activating the option. The other issue is that the difference between the disabled envelope and the active one is awfully hard to see. Try and spot the difference between the active link below and the disabled link in the first screen shot.