The more our guys play with the the new iPhone OS 3.0 firmware, the more little gems they’re finding. Tucked away within the Podcast playback screen are a few subtle changes that went unmentioned during today’s announcement. Apple did say there were some 100 new features in the new OS, so it’ll probably be awhile before we see them all.
New Podcast Features:
- The Repeat and Shuffle buttons are gone (probably because they’re rarely used with podcasts, as they tend to be much longer than songs).
- The top left of the screen now features a mail icon, which currently just crashes the app. We’d assume this lets you send someone the iTunes link.
- In the center, directly below the scrubber, is a button that allows you to instantly rewind by 30 seconds.
- On the right is a Speed modifier, allowing you to playback podcasts at double or half their normal rate
- Variable speed scrubbing: We’re not sure if Apple has a name for this yet, but we like “Super Scrubbing”. Scrubbing is a fancy term for jumping to the right spot by grabbing the little marker in the timeline and dragging it around. Scrubbing to the perfect spot in a really long audio file is tough – but they’ve made it a whole lot easier. If you hold the marker dead-on, you scrub as normal. If you continue to hold but slide your finger up above the marker, the iPhone goes into “High Speed” scrubbing mode, lowering precision and moving the marker further relative to your finger. If you instead slide below the marker, it enters Half Speed scrubbing mode, which increases precision and allows you to jump around in smaller increments. Continue sliding downward and it enters Quarter speed – you can guess what that one does.
None of these new toys show up during the playback of music or video.
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Argh! Apple already has the Best UI For Audio Ever: the click wheel. I really wish they’d had a touchscreen emulation for the wheel on the iPhone/iPod touch. This scrubber thing sounds stupidly complicated.
I think they lost the patent on the click wheel. From what I understand, the remaining iPods which use it are grandfathered, but all future devices use new interfaces like you see on the Touch and iPhone.
Very interesting, I hadn’t heard that. Is the issue that someone else owns the patent? Do you have a reference for this anywhere?
Podcast descriptions? It’s ridiculous that this feature is missing!
What about the UI for getting new episodes? Currently you have to refresh each podcast separately, and when you do, you are sent on a confusing excursion to the iTunes app via a brief stop in safari. If there is no new episode you’re left in iTunes and have to navigate back to iPod automatically.
The way it should work is: you subscribe to podcasts, and the phone checks for updates in the background. A badge on the app icon alerts you when there are new episodes available. No excursions to iTunes needed. And of course it ought to be possible to subscribe to podcasts not listed in iTunes.
I like all of these additions, but I wish they would have added bookmarking.
That scrubbing method is almost exactly the way I had described in a feedback I sent to Apple. Sweet!
I’m disappointed if this is Apple’s solution to scrubbing through audio and video on the iPhone. I still carry a 4G iPod with me in addition to the iPhone because without a usable media scrubber on the iPhone, I find it less usable than a Walkman as a media player (as you recall, the Walkman had easily accessible fast forward and rewind buttons).
Right now, with the iPod click wheel, you can scrub through audio without having to look at the device. You know that one swirl gesture around the click wheel is about a minute forward or back. It works great. But with this idea with the iPhone, you’re going to have to still look at the screen, touch the right spot, hold for the right amount of time and then gesture.
And it doesn’t make sense that finely tuned scrubbing would only be available for podcasts. It would be great if it worked for all formats, especially movies, so you could more easily go back 30 seconds to re-hear the line of dialogue you missed.
It would make more sense if you could scrub via gesture: Enter the scrub mode and swipe your fingers across the screen to move forward in 30-second increments, etc. Or it would make even greater sense if Apple had an in-line remote on its earbuds that contained a click wheel, so you could have iPod functionality for the media player on the iPhone.
Or, one last idea, a major hardware change to the iPhone: Make the whole glass face of the iPhone clickable, like it’s a big button, similar to the MacBook trackpad. When you’re in iPod mode and you want to scrub forward or backward through media, you click the face, which like clicking the center wheel of the iPod, brings up the scrub bar. Use a circular gesture forward or backward, much like you’d use on a scroll wheel iPod, to scrub through audio or video. It would work more like the iPod and you could scrub without having to look at the iPhone.
The whole face clickable? No. Click wheel in-line remote? You can wear it, but I’m not. Maybe you could just make a Y adapter with a short part that went to a nano. Keep the music on there where you have a click wheel. Put it in a case that you can clip to your shirt.
Podcast descriptions WTF!?!?
And +1 on refreshing podcasts. I had hoped they would give this an overhaul in line with what Sten suggests, but I’m prepared to be dissapointed.