Apr 27 2009
5 Things to do with your new iPod touch
The iPod touch is a beautiful little machine. Thanks to powerful
hardware and the creativity of developers it is capable of all kinds
of things – even controlling your home automation setup. Here’s a
short list of some of the more powerful things you should be doing on
your iPod touch:
Present on your Mac
Fresh off the Keynote demo, the new
control Keynote presentations from your Mac. Not keen on waiting for
09 to ship? Try Mocha
VNC or VNC Lite from the app store. VNC will give you complete GUI
control of your Mac. And let’s not forget Apple’s own
that allows you to take over iTunes to play songs, movies or podcasts.
Capture ideas on your iPod
Ideas don’t always conveniently strike while you are at your keyboard.
Fortunately, there are some on-the-go solutions for jotting things
down for use later. The first is
free (with paid option) service comes with an iPhone app that lets you
jot notes for upload to Evernote. It works offline and, when you
upgrade to the iPhone, it will capture pictures as well. In turn,
Evernote’s online service lets you sync, organize and even scan
pictures for text.
If you don’t care for a hosted service,
version) allows you to quickly outline thoughts and email them as an
OPML file for later analysis.
Take Knowledge Offline
Sure its great, all the things you can find on the ‘net on your touch,
but what about those times when you’re offline? Shouldn’t you set
aside some of that space for some info you might need on the bus,
train plane or school?
Wikiamo thinks
so. This app will let you browse Wikipedia and stash pages for
off-line reading. But why stop there? You can take your own Google
docs offline with apps like
Listen to Music that isn’t Yours
While you have that network connection, put it to good use. Streaming
music from the Internet is nothing new. But the way
is. On Pandora (iPhone, web or Mac app) you create a ‘station’ by
giving Pandora a song you like. Pandora, though some fancy magical
algorithm streams you hours of related music. Not only is it a great
way to listen to music you will probably like, it is also a great way
to find new music.
If you don’t care for Pandora’s client, you might try
- who also has a client for you iPod touch.
Swap files with your Mac
One of the few lacks of the iPhone OS that separate it from grown-up
operating systems is file management. Wether or not the iPhone needs
file management is a debate for another time. For those of you that do
want to store and swap files from your iPod touch there are solutions.
The most Mac-ish app is
brother Briefcase Lite) which allows you to browse Macs and send files
back and forth. Like the other app I’ll mention, it allows access to
the files on the device itself.
If you’re looking for flexibility, the free
to browse the iPod from any platform on the network via web-browser.
Rather than give you access to the computer via iPod, Discover works
the opposite as Briefcase – accessing the iPod from your Mac, Windows
or Linux machine.
With the App store quickly filling with fart apps, it is nice to know
you can get some serious things done on your iPod.
I don’t know what I’d use this for, but it is very, very cool.