Some observations about the new iPhone/iPod Touch OS

David Weintraub (apparently) - 01:12am Jun 20, 2009 PST
via email

I just wanted to run by some of my observations:

Cut and Paste rocks, and in of itself is worth the $10 upgrade fee! I
was pleasantly surprised it works with lots of third party
applications right out of the box. I find it convenient when you have
a URL, but want to return to the base address. Before, you had a
choice of erasing a character at a time, or deleting the complete
address. Now, you can select what you want to delete. A few places
where it doesn't work. For example, Appigo's Notebook doesn't allow
you to copy text unless the note is opened for editing. Probably has
to do with how the API is used.

There are several very nice changes in the "iPod" side of the Touch.
First is a 30 second rewind which is great. There are a lot of times I
am listening to a podcast when an ambulance comes by and I couldn't
hear the podcast. Before came the delicate task of playing with the
slider that controls where you are in the Podcast. I would have to
note where I was, and then try to adjust it to be a few seconds
earlier.

The second is the ability to listen to a podcast at twice the speed or
1/2 speed. I find it a great way to pick up the news. Unfortunately,
the progress bar doesn't seem to update as well as it should. I was
listening to one podcast segment, and when the next segment came up,
it was still showing the old segment as playing.

The final change is the ability to email the podcast's iTunes store
URL to someone else. I haven't use this yet, so I can't say how well
it works.

Note synchronization took me a while to get. You have to set it in
iTunes on your computer, and when I first did it, it kept deselecting.
I finally quit iTunes and restarted my iPod Touch to get it to work.
Notes synchronize with Mail.app. However, I've already bought Appigo's
Notebook and ToDo list which synchronizes to either "Don't Forget the
Milk" or Toodledo websites. Appigo's applications have categories and
you can lock and hide notes. Maybe if Note synchronization already
existed, I wouldn't have bothered buying Appigo's applications. But, I
still prefer Appigo's Notepad to Apple's. Maybe with the 3.0 OS, it
would be possible for Appigo to synchronize my data to the websites
whenever I synchronize my iPod Touch to my computer.

There is one issue I have and that is that the WiFi doesn't seem to
work as well. You start off with a strong connection, and it slowly
loses strength. If I go back into the WiFi setting, and reselect it,
the signal becomes full strength once again. I suspect there will be
an OS update in a few weeks as Apple works out these bugs.

--
David Weintraub
qazwartgmail.com