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A podcast about all things Macintosh. For Mac geeks, by Mac geeks. Show 372. Apple acquires another mapping company. Order online and pick up in store. iPhone 4S expands globally and domestically. Garagband now on iPhones and iPods. iMessage coming to OS X. Death of the Mac Pro Soon. Maccast One Minute Tip: Aliases. What’s the deal with the iPad Music app? iCloud and Sharing Contacts and Calendars. iPhone 4S issues and fixes. Syncing a 1st Gen iPod. Wi-Fi Syncing iOS devices. Migrating Notes, Syncing, and security. Comments on iOS file management.
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I agree, the Music app on the iPad is a giant step backwards in regards to podcasts and audiobook options. Sometimes you can guess why Apple does things, but I can come up with no good reasons why the iPad version would be featured impaired compared to the iPhone/iPod Touch versions.
So some time ago I went to 3rd party apps for podcasts. As you said Downcast is quite good, but I mainly use iCatcher which was the first one dedicated for the iPad and has all the advanced functions similar to Downcast. I just had some problems with Downcast at times. Downcast and iCatcher also allow you to speed up video podcasts.
But this doesn’t fix the audiobook problem as far a playback speeds go. Of course Audible has it’s own app, though it is not a universal app. But I create a lot of audiobooks using the OSX Voices. For that I use an app called Speedup which allows you to set the playback speed to whatever you want, though it also is not a universal app. It will speedup anything you have in your library.
Both the Music and Video apps on the iPad are garbage. Even the shuffle and repeat options are a mystery to me. Does light-colored mean on, or does dark-colored mean on? But strangely, during the developer beta period, all I heard was that this app was fantastic.
I was hoping the Video app in iOS 5 would become as good as the iPod touch one, but it’s horrible. You can’t have it play music videos one after the other without a trick I don’t want to do, and you can only see songs sorted by title, not by artist. I use an app called VP Lite which isn’t brilliant, but it’s OK.
they only thing that’s prevented my wife and i to following your iCloud advice is our desire to have one shared Photostream. we love having all our pictures on both our iPhones, iPads, and computers.
It isn’t possible to share that with different iCloud accounts unfortunately.
Also, we do share a separate iTunes account, and we do have different iMessages accounts. currently only both our phones back up to the Cloud, we’d surpass our free 5gb limit if our iPads also did so.
so for now, until Apple changes things, we changed Siri to simply call us Friend instead of our names.
also, if you only want to share calendars, instead of creating a 3rd iCloud account, you could simply “share” a calendar via ical and invite your spouse to be a reader/editor of the calendar.
Decided to dig out my old iPod 2g which is also FireWire only to see whether it would still sync with the current iTunes software and sure enough it does.
That said, it can go back to gathering dust in peace….