Hell Yeah Bitch! .com

In my continuing effort to become one with all things Apple I ordered an iPod, which arrived in the mail yesterday. I decided to go with the 4gig black model because I’ve been wanting a flash-based player about that size for a few years now. Until the Nano the best you could get for a few hundred dollars was a 128mb or 512mb Rio or somesuch. Enough space for just a couple CDs? No Thanks. The Nano is big enough to hold nearly two days worth of music\podcasts, which is plenty good enough for me (but not Mike, though, who needed to overcompensate with the 20gig iPod).

This being my first iPod and not really using one much at all before this I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. I’d messed around with my brother’s for a few minutes, had a general concept of the click wheel, but moving songs onto it and all that was unknown.

Before I get into my initial user experience let me tell you one thing: If you’re planning on buying one of the Nanos buy your protective cover first! I managed to put a bunch of little micro-scratches on the front of the Nano when I was cleaning it with a lint-free cloth in prep for putting The InvisibleShield on it (ironic, yes?). I don’t care what Apple says, the thing scratches pretty damn easy.

I’m going to go into a mini-bitchfest about iTunes-iPod but before I do I have to say that I really love this music player. It fits into that before-now-useless tiny front pocket in your jeans. 8 hours of battery life, and 2 days worth of music in that teeny tiny pocket. The screen is just big enough and remarkably sharp. I’ve got fat thumbs so the click wheel is a tad on the small side but I think it’d be fine for most folks.

I installed the software, plugged the Nano in and iTunes automatically added it into its sidebar. This is where the fantastic Apple Experience started to fall apart a bit…

iTunes told me that basically I had too much music on my Mac than would fit onto my Nano (well duh). Would I like to have iTunes autofill my Nano with music? No. Please don’t – I like most of the music on my computer, but really not all of it all the time. So I go into my Library, select an album and drag it over to my iPod but wai- huh? It won’t go. I can’t get my selection to drop onto my iPod. ok…. option-click on my music looking for an ‘add to iPod’ menu option – no such luck.

This leads me to Lesson 2: (lesson 1 was buy a cover) Its best to let Apple decide what you want on your iPod because you can pick-and-choose what you want on it, but we’re not going to tell you how.

If I had wanted to autofill my Nano I would have chosen ‘Yes’. But I didn’t and clicking ‘No’ should have let me start adding the music I wanted to immediately. Instead I had to poke around in the iTunes interface looking for an ‘add to iPod’ button and finally the iPod preferences where I found ‘Manually manage songs and playlists’ which set things straight.

When everything in the Appleverse is so focused on drag&drop functionality that ‘just works’ not being able to drop music onto my new toy was pretty frustrating. Anyway – poking around in the preferences fixed that, so I should quit complaining. It just didn’t fit the perfect experience I was expecting.

In closing: the initial experience sucked; things were better once I got the preferences set right; Apple is the best company ever; go buy an iPod if you don’t have one yet; buy a second iPod if you already have one; and My Name is Earl is an awesome show.