first-impression review: yesterday's iPod firmware update

[mmcirvin]

In case you stopped bothering to check (I had), yesterday's updater is actually the first one in a long time that has updates for iPods older than the fourth-generation models.

After updating, the menu items now match the newer iPods: "Browse" is now called "Music" and includes playlists, and there's a new Shuffle Songs menu item that just plays your whole library on shuffle. (I'd prefer it if it switched the shuffle option on and off for general play—you still have to burrow into the settings menu to do that. But, as with the flash iPod, Apple seems to have responded to studies showing that shuffle-the-whole-library is how people mostly use their music players anyway.)

The front menu is as customizable as before, so you don't have to have the shuffle thing there, and you can still have Playlists on the front menu.

I may be imagining things, but the update also seems to have reduced the surrealism of the battery indicator: it is now capable of remembering that it's fully charged right after you stop charging it because it says it's fully charged. This will probably prevent a lot of people from falsely believing that their batteries have died. The big "charging" icon that fills the whole screen when it's plugged in and not playing has changed slightly in appearance, and no longer looks like the long-gone four-bar battery indicator.

Other than that, nothing much; there are no major new features. There are probably other bug fixes in there, and it didn't make anything explode or irritate me, so I'd say get it if you have an iPod.

Finally, I do wish Apple would stop making Software Update auto-launch iPod updaters. It's asinine: more often than not, I download these things along with a Mac system patch that requires reboot, and the iPod updater's auto-launching cancels the reboot.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...People who do the gimmick of DJing parties with iPods solve the absence of crossfade in an old-fashioned manner, by using two iPods connected through a physical fader just as if they were using turntables. It's really more practical to use a laptop, of course.