TweetFollow Us on Twitter

iPod Madness

Volume Number: 19 (2003)
Issue Number: 6
Column Tag: iPod

Getting Started

iPod Madness

by Dave Mark

OK, I'll try to explain this as best I can.

Seems to me it was just a few days ago when the darn thing arrived. I had already started writing my WWDC column. Basically, a follow-on to last month's TinyViewer Interface Builder column.

That's when the doorbell rang.

It was an innocuous looking package, return address Apple Computer, Cupertino, California. I immediately ripped it open, ignored the disk and other trimmings, and pulled out...COOL...a new iPod! Better put it aside - gotta get that column finished.

Hrm...it's just so shiny. Must focus. Must put down shiny iPod.

With great force of will, I put the iPod back in its box and returned to my computer. And that's when I got the email. Guess what, Dave? The new iPods support this cool new markup language so you can create your own linked iPod content. Wha? Huh? And there are these cool new AppleScripts you can play with to manage your iPod notes?

It was all over. All semblance of willpower was lost. iPod madness had taken over.

iPod Notes

As you can tell, I love the new iPods. The case design is gorgeous. The new design is much slimmer and the controls sleeker. The 15 and 30 gig units ship with a cradle and the cradle works quite well. Tie it all up with a new iTunes release and the integrated iTunes Music Store and you've got a marketing windfall for Apple. Can you say ka-ching?

When you double-click your iPod's Finder icon, you'll see three top-level folders: Calendars, Contacts, and Notes. Any items placed in the Notes folder are fair game for the Note Reader, an app built into each of the new iPods (but, sadly, not in any of the older models).

By default, the iPod ships with a single file, named Instructions, in the Notes folder. The Instructions file consists of a single text string, "<INSTRUCTIONS>". Welcome to your first iPod Notes tag. Though not particularly useful for your purposes, the <INSTRUCTIONS> tag tells the Notes Reader to display a simple set of instructions built into the iPod. One cool thing about this tag. Change the language, the instruction language changes. Change the language setting to Espanol, and the instructions appear in Spanish. As it should be.

From the user's perspective, the Notes folder is simply a collecting point for relatively small (notes are limited to 4kb - any bigger, they get truncated) text files. Got a collection of recipes? Put one per file in a collection of folders and drag the folder hierarchy to the iPod's Notes folder. For example, you might organize your recipes in a Recipes folder, with subfolders for Soups, Hors D'oeuvres, Salads, Entrees, and Desserts. You might store each recipe in its own text file, then organize the text files in the correct folder (soup recipe files in the Soups folder, etc.). Now drag the entire Recipes folder into the iPod's Notes folder.

    If you are trying this at home, be sure the Enable FireWire disk use checkbox is checked in the iPod preferences in iTunes 4. If you can't find that preference, attach your iPod to your Mac. Then, when it appears in the iTunes list, click on the iPod's icon in the list on the left-hand-side, then click the iPod icon on the bottom-right corner of the window (left-most of the 4 bottom icons).

When you fire up your iPod, click on Extras, then Notes. On the Notes page, you'll see Instructions as well as a Recipes item. Select Recipes and you'll see the Soups, Hors D'oeuvres, Salads, Entrees, and Desserts folder (see Figure 1). Select Soups, you'll see a list of the Soups text files. Select one of those and the text from that file is displayed. To get back, click the Menu button. Note that the Menu button is more like a browser's back button than a "move up a level" button. When you start playing with links, you'll see what I mean.


Figure 1. The Recipes categories on my iPod.

    Limitations: A single note can be up to 4kb. The current iPods support up to 1,000 notes. The Notes cache is 64kb. Once the cache is exceeded, the cache is flushed, the hard drive spins up and new notes are cached as needed.

iPod Note Tags

Currently, the Notes Reader supports a very small set of HTML tags. All tags are case insensitive.

Use <BR> or the pairing of <P> and </P> to force a paragraph break in your running text.

You'll use <TITLE> and </TITLE> to create a title for your page. If your text file does not contain a <TITLE> tag, the file name is used as the title. If the <TITLE> tag is there, the <TITLE> specified will be displayed at the top of the screen when the text file is shown, and is also used in the scrolling list that contains the text file.

Link Tags

The iPod link tag looks just like its HTML counterpart and allows you to link notes together. Here's an example. I started by creating a text file named Ideal Meal, saving it in the Recipes folder:

<TITLE>An Ideal Meal</TITLE>
The ideal meal always start with a nice piece
of <A HREF="Halvah">halvah</A>, followed immediately by a healthy serving of Mama's 
secret <A HREF="Gravlax">gravlax recipe</A>

I then created a file called Halvah, also saving it in the Recipes folder:

<TITLE>Halvah</TITLE>
A confection made out of crushed sesame seeds and honey. Have a nice piece of Halvah today. It 
couldn't hoit. Goes well with <A HREF="Gravlax">gravlax</A>.
<BR><BR>Back to <A HREF="/Recipes">Recipes</A>.

And finally, a file called Gravlax, also saved in the Recipes folder:

<TITLE>Gravlax</TITLE>
Raw salmon, usually seasoned with dill. Have a nice piece of gravlax with your 
<A HREF="Halvah">halvah</A>. Eat. Eat.

    A note on editing your note files. If you use an editor like Word, be sure smart quotes are turned off. When I created some notes with smart quotes, the iPod displayed them with extreme funkiness. This is because the text encoding used by Word does not match the default encoding of the Notes Reader. More on this in next month's column.

    Also, don't put a hard return in your notes unless you really want a hard return in there. When I use BBEdit, I select Text Options from the Edit menu, then click the Soft Wrap Text radio button and set it to Window Width.

Remember, this is rev 1 of iPod Notes. Over time, I suspect we'll see more tags and other text handling options. And a color screen? With image tag support and an Ethernet port? Huh? Couldja? Please? J

Figure 2 shows the Recipes notes folder after I copied my 3 new notes over to the iPod.


Figure 2. The Recipes folder with 3 added files.

Click on An Ideal Meal (Figure 3). Notice that there are 2 links in this text. The first link is selected by default, with the underline of the second link barely visible. How do you get from link to link? The scroll wheel, of course! Scrolling the wheel counterclockwise moves you up a link, stepping from link to link, stopping at the first one on the page. Scrolling the wheel clockwise moves you down the page, link by link. Keep scrolling and you stop at the last link on the page. There is no wraparound effect if you keep scrolling.


Figure 3. What happens when I click on An Ideal Meal.

Figure 4 shows the Gravlax note, with the halvah link selected. Click on the halvah link and you'll jump to the Halvah note (Figure 5). Note that if you keep selecting links, you'll pop back and forth between Gravlax and Halvah. The interesting thing here is that the links are stacked (like a browser), so when you click the Menu button, you'll bounce back to the previous page, as opposed to moving up in the folder hierarchy.


Figure 4. The Gravlax note, with a link to halvah.

Note that the Halvah note contains a link back up to the Recipes folder. Click this link, and you'll be back up to the screen shot shown in Figure 2. We'll explore link formats in the next section.


Figure 5. The Halvah note, with a links to gravlax and the Recipes folder.

Relative v. Absolute

Just as you can with your web files, you can refer to other notes using relative or absolute link paths. Note that / refers to the inside of the Notes folder, so /Recipes/Halvah really refers to /Notes/Recipes/Halvah. For example, here are some absolute links:

<A HREF=file:///Gravlax>Link to /Gravlax (an error)</A>
<A HREF=file:///Recipes/Halvah>Link to /Recipes/Halvah</A>
<A HREF=/Gravlax>Link to /Gravlax (an error)</A>
<A HREF=/Recipes/Halvah>Link to /Recipes/Halvah</A>

Here are some relative links:

<A HREF=file://Gravlax>Link to Gravlax (in the current 
                                                               directory)</A>
<A HREF=file://Recipes/Halvah>Link to Recipes/Halvah
         (only works if the linking file is in the same
         dir as Recipes)</A>
<A HREF=Gravlax>Link to Gravlax (in the current 
                                                               directory)</A>
<A HREF=Recipes/Halvah>Link to Recipes/Halvah, where
                     Recipes/ is in the current directory</A>

    Note that file names are not case sensitive. Feel free to use any of /, \, or : as a file delimiter, but remember that none of these are legal FAT file name characters and that : is not legal in an HFS+ file name. Use a backslash to escape special characters that are part of the file name itself. For example:

    <HREF="Ferret recipes, 6\/23\/03">

Note also that you cannot link to the Notes folder itself, nor can you link outside the Notes folder. You will simply annoy the Notes Reader.

Dead Links

The Note Reader automatically checks every note for dead links. To see the results of this test, include an <ERRORS> tag in one your notes. The note containing the <ERRORS> tag is completely replaced with a list of all the errors found in all the notes. This means you only need one <ERRORS> tag for your entire hierarchy. Use a testing note for this purpose, not a note containing useful content. Once you've tested your notes, you can delete the error checking note.

Figure 6 shows the results of a couple of purposely malformed links. Bad iPod, bad.


Figure 6. The <ERRORS> tag at work.

Link Files

Just as you might use a file to redirect a user from one url to another, you can use a .link file to redirect a link and a .linx file to spoof a folder of links. Here's how this works.

Create a file named pizza.link that contains the following text:

<TITLE>Pizza Link</TITLE>
<A HREF="Real Pizza">Blap</A> 

Next, create a file named Real Pizza with this text:

Hey, I'm the REAL pizza file. Not that other phony. My file name is Real Pizza.

Put them both in the same folder, somewhere inside the Notes hierarchy. When you scroll to that folder, you'll see two files listed, one named Pizza Link and one named Real Pizza. Click on either one and the Real Pizza content is displayed. Since we never display the link inside pizza.link, the text Blap never appears. Hmmm. Maybe this is a good place to put your favorite bad words.

.link files let you store content in one file and refer to it from other directories. Can you say alias?

A .linx file is similar, but it is used to spoof a folder. Here's an example. Create a file named evil.linx with this content:

<TITLE>Evil, Do Not Taunt</TITLE>
<A HREF="doctors/Dr. Sardonacus">Dr. Sardonacus</A> 
<A HREF="doctors/Doc Ock">Doc Ock</A>
<A HREF="doctors/Dr. Strangelove">Dr. Strangelove</A>
<A HREF="doctors/Dr. No">Dr. No</A>
<A HREF="doctors/Dr. Evil">Dr. Evil</A>

Next, create a folder named doctors in the same folder as evil.linx. Finally, create note files named Dr. Sardonacus, Doc Ock, Dr. Stragelove, Dr. No and, of course, Dr. Evil in the doctors folder. Figure 7 shows what happens when you scroll to the folder named Evil, Do Not Taunt. Notice that the notes listed in this directory are listed in the order we specified in the .linx file, not in alphabetical order. This can be useful!


Figure 7. Been to the doctor lately?

Main.linx

When you navigate into the Notes folder, Notes Reader looks for a file named Main.linx in the Notes folder. If it finds Main.linx, it uses that list to replace anything else in the Notes listing it would normally show. For example, this is a sample I created for the new Macintosh Art Museum Annex (MAMA), just south of Cupertino in Veerkidnya.

<TITLE>Mac Museum</TITLE>
<A HREF="Art/Woman in Kimono">Kimono</A> 
<A HREF="Art/Clarus">Dog Cow</A>
<A HREF="Art/Zebra Lady">Zebra Lady</A>

Figure 8 shows what happens when I click on the Notes folder. Note that none of my other content is shown. The only things listed are the links in Main.linx.


Figure 8. The Mac Museum, in all its glory.

For those of you playing at home, note that links in a .linx file are checked before they are listed. So if you are trying to follow along and you have trouble getting the links in your .linx file to appear, be sure you've created the files referenced in the individual links. The example above won't work properly until I create the Art folder and the three files within that folder. Capisce?

    Worth a look: A new app named iPodNotes from XtremeMac along with a site named http://www.iPodNotes.com. Pretty interesting. The app is designed to help you create and manage your iPod note projects. You can create a new project (essentially, a notes folder hierarchy), add files and folders, edit the files, and even create links to text and audio files.

    The web site borrows from the iCal concept and allows you to share your projects with other folks. For example, my buddy David could upload his list of things he thinks I should do when I make that trek to Iceland I've been dreaming about, along with notes for each item in the list. Or maybe someone would upload the Red Stripes touring schedule for the summer. Or how about if someone put together an audio tour of historic Civil War battlefields that you could download and take with you. It's all good.

    Though this puppy is still in its early stages, I really like this concept. Check it out.

Till Next Month...

Imagine walking down the halls of the Louvre with an iPod in your hand, headsets in place. You click on the Notes folder and see a series of folders, each corresponding to one of the 9 main sections of the Louvre. Click on Salles des Peintures, and you might find a list of the major works of art in that section, including the Mona Lisa. Click on Mona Lisa and you might see a textual description of the painting, along with an embedded link to an audio file describing recent restoration projects related to the Mona Lisa. This model really touches on the power and potential of the Notes Reader.

Next month, we'll dig a little deeper into iPod Notes. We'll see how to create links to audio files and how to work with Note Reader preferences. One of these preferences, NotesOnly, puts your iPod into Museum Mode which causes your iPod to boot right into Note Reader. Perfect for the Louvre example above. We'll also mess with some cool AppleScripts designed especially to help you manage your notes. Remember, if you are at WWDC, come say hello! See you then...


Dave Mark is a long-time Mac developer and blah, blah, blah... We interrupt this important bio to bring you an important message: Gonna be at WWDC? Be sure to find Dave and say hi (His pic is up on mactech.com and spiderworks.com). Bring your comments, suggestions, and maybe even a nice piece of gum.

 

Community Search:
MacTech Search:

Software Updates via MacUpdate

Latest Forum Discussions

See All

Top Mobile Game Discounts
Every day, we pick out a curated list of the best mobile discounts on the App Store and post them here. This list won't be comprehensive, but it every game on it is recommended. Feel free to check out the coverage we did on them in the links... | Read more »
Price of Glory unleashes its 1.4 Alpha u...
As much as we all probably dislike Maths as a subject, we do have to hand it to geometry for giving us the good old Hexgrid, home of some of the best strategy games. One such example, Price of Glory, has dropped its 1.4 Alpha update, stocked full... | Read more »
The SLC 2025 kicks off this month to cro...
Ever since the Solo Leveling: Arise Championship 2025 was announced, I have been looking forward to it. The promotional clip they released a month or two back showed crowds going absolutely nuts for the previous competitions, so imagine the... | Read more »
Dive into some early Magicpunk fun as Cr...
Excellent news for fans of steampunk and magic; the Precursor Test for Magicpunk MMORPG Crystal of Atlan opens today. This rather fancy way of saying beta test will remain open until March 5th and is available for PC - boo - and Android devices -... | Read more »
Prepare to get your mind melted as Evang...
If you are a fan of sci-fi shooters and incredibly weird, mind-bending anime series, then you are in for a treat, as Goddess of Victory: Nikke is gearing up for its second collaboration with Evangelion. We were also treated to an upcoming... | Read more »
Square Enix gives with one hand and slap...
We have something of a mixed bag coming over from Square Enix HQ today. Two of their mobile games are revelling in life with new events keeping them alive, whilst another has been thrown onto the ever-growing discard pile Square is building. I... | Read more »
Let the world burn as you have some fest...
It is time to leave the world burning once again as you take a much-needed break from that whole “hero” lark and enjoy some celebrations in Genshin Impact. Version 5.4, Moonlight Amidst Dreams, will see you in Inazuma to attend the Mikawa Flower... | Read more »
Full Moon Over the Abyssal Sea lands on...
Aether Gazer has announced its latest major update, and it is one of the loveliest event names I have ever heard. Full Moon Over the Abyssal Sea is an amazing name, and it comes loaded with two side stories, a new S-grade Modifier, and some fancy... | Read more »
Open your own eatery for all the forest...
Very important question; when you read the title Zoo Restaurant, do you also immediately think of running a restaurant in which you cook Zoo animals as the course? I will just assume yes. Anyway, come June 23rd we will all be able to start up our... | Read more »
Crystal of Atlan opens registration for...
Nuverse was prominently featured in the last month for all the wrong reasons with the USA TikTok debacle, but now it is putting all that behind it and preparing for the Crystal of Atlan beta test. Taking place between February 18th and March 5th,... | Read more »

Price Scanner via MacPrices.net

AT&T is offering a 65% discount on the ne...
AT&T is offering the new iPhone 16e for up to 65% off their monthly finance fee with 36-months of service. No trade-in is required. Discount is applied via monthly bill credits over the 36 month... Read more
Use this code to get a free iPhone 13 at Visi...
For a limited time, use code SWEETDEAL to get a free 128GB iPhone 13 Visible, Verizon’s low-cost wireless cell service, Visible. Deal is valid when you purchase the Visible+ annual plan. Free... Read more
M4 Mac minis on sale for $50-$80 off MSRP at...
B&H Photo has M4 Mac minis in stock and on sale right now for $50 to $80 off Apple’s MSRP, each including free 1-2 day shipping to most US addresses: – M4 Mac mini (16GB/256GB): $549, $50 off... Read more
Buy an iPhone 16 at Boost Mobile and get one...
Boost Mobile, an MVNO using AT&T and T-Mobile’s networks, is offering one year of free Unlimited service with the purchase of any iPhone 16. Purchase the iPhone at standard MSRP, and then choose... Read more
Get an iPhone 15 for only $299 at Boost Mobil...
Boost Mobile, an MVNO using AT&T and T-Mobile’s networks, is offering the 128GB iPhone 15 for $299.99 including service with their Unlimited Premium plan (50GB of premium data, $60/month), or $20... Read more
Unreal Mobile is offering $100 off any new iP...
Unreal Mobile, an MVNO using AT&T and T-Mobile’s networks, is offering a $100 discount on any new iPhone with service. This includes new iPhone 16 models as well as iPhone 15, 14, 13, and SE... Read more
Apple drops prices on clearance iPhone 14 mod...
With today’s introduction of the new iPhone 16e, Apple has discontinued the iPhone 14, 14 Pro, and SE. In response, Apple has dropped prices on unlocked, Certified Refurbished, iPhone 14 models to a... Read more
B&H has 16-inch M4 Max MacBook Pros on sa...
B&H Photo is offering a $360-$410 discount on new 16-inch MacBook Pros with M4 Max CPUs right now. B&H offers free 1-2 day shipping to most US addresses: – 16″ M4 Max MacBook Pro (36GB/1TB/... Read more
Amazon is offering a $100 discount on the M4...
Amazon has the M4 Pro Mac mini discounted $100 off MSRP right now. Shipping is free. Their price is the lowest currently available for this popular mini: – Mac mini M4 Pro (24GB/512GB): $1299, $100... Read more
B&H continues to offer $150-$220 discount...
B&H Photo has 14-inch M4 MacBook Pros on sale for $150-$220 off MSRP. B&H offers free 1-2 day shipping to most US addresses: – 14″ M4 MacBook Pro (16GB/512GB): $1449, $150 off MSRP – 14″ M4... Read more

Jobs Board

All contents are Copyright 1984-2011 by Xplain Corporation. All rights reserved. Theme designed by Icreon.