Pac Man on my iPod!

Tuesday, 2006-09-12; 13:08:00



I ADMIT IT! I'm a total sucker! I plunked down $4.99 to be able to play Pac Man on my iPod the first second I got. I totally couldn't resist. (I would've bought Tetris too, if only it wasn't that new-fangled fancy-shmancy graphics-shmaphics version.)

But seriously, come on, how cool is this?:

Pac Man on my iPod

Freedom from solitaire at last!

By the way, if you haven't downloaded iTunes 7, I strongly recommend you do so. If you can get past the radically modernized interface, which is just a tad bit much, there are so many improvements in the newest version of iTunes.

Video performance playback is radically improved, one of my main gripes with iTunes before. You can now edit TV show/video metadata without resorting to Parsley is Atomically Delicious, which was another of my biggest gripes. You can now download album cover art straight through iTunes with no extra charge, and it's ridiculously high quality compared to what even Walmart gives you on its website. It even works for song files from *ahem* "illicit" sources, as long as you have the album name. (So TuneTagger hasn't been rendered totally obsolete. :P ) The interface that tells you how much of your iPod is used up is much more useful now, because it tells you how much space is being used up by music, photos, videos, other, and how much is free. It's a custom, colored progress bar:

iTunes progress bar for iPod space usage

For some reason, I've reclaimed a few GB of iPod disk space usage after installing iTunes 7; I used to have 8 GB free, and now I have 14 GB, as you can see. Maybe it relates to the album art in iTunes? Err, nope. iTunes deleted all my videos from my video iPod. Probably because I had to re-authorize my computer for iTunes 7. No miraculous space savings, sadly.

iTunes 7 even integrates the sweet, sweet album browsing interface of CoverFlow, which was sold to Apple. I was a bit disturbed when Apple announced the album browsing view and when they even called it "cover flow" view, but I'm pleased that the guy's technology wasn't copied, it was sold.

Finally, iTunes 7 fixes that really, really annoying bug where you couldn't click-and-hold on the fast forward and reverse buttons in the iTunes mini window to scrub within a track; it used to automatically unactivate the button after a single 5-second scrub.


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