iPod ClassicFollowing last week's announcements from Apple I had a decision to make: iPod Touch or iPod Classic. But really there was no contest-- I have far too much in my iTunes library to consider a player with "only" 16GB of space.
My player of choice has been an iPod photo, which I picked up shortly after they came out. It was a little thicker and heavier than other iPods of its generation, but I didn't care because it was also the only one with a color screen. I hardly even cared about putting photos on it. The color display made all other iPods to date look old and primitive. However I've just about run out of space on it, and my music collection continues its expansion.
So on Saturday I picked up an iPod Classic. At 160GB my iPod now has a bigger hard drive than my laptop, but I have no doubt I'll eventually find a need for all that space.
Incidentally, I apologize for the image quality in this post. If anyone knows a good way to get iPod screenshots, please tell me.
Cover FlowSuperficially it's the same as the video iPods that have been available for a while, but there are some nice user interface enhancements. Cover Flow is probably the best-known addition. The demo model at the Apple store appeared to be demonstrating a bug related to this, in that if I browsed Cover Flow while music was playing, the music would stutter horribly. I didn't consider that a deal breaker, but as it turned out mine doesn't do that anyway. I'll be interested to see if this behavior turns up "in the wild".
Browsing albumsOther nice user interface improvements abound. The menu has been shrunk down to a little less than half the screen, with the rest taken up by a Ken Burns-ish display of album art. Browsing albums also shows album art.
Minor annoyances
SettingsOne UI change that doesn't seem so nice is the new ultra-narrow scrollbars. Instead of a Mac OS X-style blue scrollbar, the narrower list views use a newer dark grey line to indicate scroll position. I suppose that's just a space issue, and I could live with the look.
The problem with these scrollbars is that they're not visible until you attempt to scroll the list. As a result there's no visual cue that a list is scrollable when you're just looking at it. When browsing albums or songs this probably isn't a problem, because you'll know if you have more than four albums. But with something like the settings view it's a little confusing. The visual cues suggest that you're seeing a complete list even if you aren't.
One other thing that seems like it should be a setting somewhere but doesn't seem to be is Cover Flow sorting. As far as I can tell, Cover Flow on the Classic always sorts by artist. Compare that to iTunes where the Cover Flow sorting matches the current sorting in the track list. When you have a bunch of albums that combine multiple artists, this gets annoying fast.
That's harsh, manAnd is it just me, or is iQuiz overdoing it a bit when you get your third wrong answer?
To the DVD Collection!
On the whole I'm quite pleased with it, and I expect to start filling it up with movies soon. I do hope Apple does something about the scrollbar though. That's not nice.
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