A list of the coolest gadgets, widgets, and programs to enhance your iPod experience.
"Oh, cool..."
The iPod is one of the great benefits of living in the twenty first century, right up there with advanced medicine and quilted toilet paper. Through the magic of the little white rectangle (the iPod, not the toilet paper), thousands of Americans have their entire music libraries literally at their fingertips, even if those libraries consist mainly of Weird Al Yankovic parodies and bad John Tesh albums. So, you've bought an iPod. I know you've got new toy syndrome, but while you're setting up the camcorder to film your own dorky version of an iPod commercial, be sure to check out some of the great products that have come out to enhance your iPod experience.
iPodAgent
iPodAgent is by far my favorite iPod-pimping-out software. This one little application does nearly everything you can imagine, basically turning your iPod into a PDA. It downloads news, weather, and even movie listings from around the area you live in straight to your iPod's notes section. The movie feature in particular is pretty useful, and may even list a few theatres that you didn't know existed. The newscasts come from Yahoo news, and while interesting, they take a bit of time to load. If you don't have a newspaper subscription, or just want to carry as little paper as possible, then it's a worthwhile feature.
What's more, iPodAgent can synchronize your Outlook contacts and calendar to your iPod, and can even move mp3 files from your iPod to your computer based on artist, album, or song title. It can also download PodCasts, though iTunes 4.9 is better equipped for this purpose. While this program used to be free, it now has a cost of $15. However, there's still a free trial of the program available at the link at the bottom of this article.
Griffin's iTrip
If you have an iPod and you need to use it in your car without a tape adapter (someone made the switch to CD too soon!), you'll need an iTrip, the most effective FM transmitter made exclusively for the iPod. It's a little, cool looking tube that you plug in to the top of your iPod, in both the earphone jack and the little device-powering jack. After a few seconds, the device kicks on and starts playing your music through a radio station (selectable if you install the included software, but it defaults to 87.9, a very rarely used frequency). It does take some juice from your iPod to run, so it's a good idea to pick up a car-to-iPod power cord, available from Griffin and Belkin, to avoid sucking your poor little iPod dry. In addition, you can turn off the little light that lets you know the iTrip's running, which simply eats up battery power. I've tried several FM transmitters, and this one seems to work the best; in my testing, there were a few normal pops and some static, but far less than Belkin's comparable products, which cost about the same.
Radtech's IceCreme
You take out your iPod to jam out to "I Want Candy," and as you're flipping through the songs...huh...you never noticed that before. A little scratch on the surface of your iPod. You don't think much of it at first, but it starts to bug you. In a few months, the entire screen of your iPod has these little annoying scratches, and though they don't cause a big problem, well, they just don't look that cool!
Most iPod owners will eventually face this scenario. The iPod's surface is acrylic, meaning that while it looks cool at first, scratches are taken on easily and end up looking flat-out ugly. Luckily, there are a number of fine scratch removing products out there, my favorite being RadTech's IceCreme. For under twenty bucks, you get their IceCreme A, IceCreme B, and two polishing cloths. You use one to remove deep scratches, another for light scratches, and voila, beautiful, new-looking, slightly smelly iPod. Yeah, the cremes have a little bit of a smell to them, and I wouldn't classify it as good. However, it goes away in a few hours.
The procedure itself takes a while; you'll need to buff your iPod for at least an hour. If you turn on a good show and don't get frustrated, you will definitely see results. My iPod was stolen, mistreated, then eventually returned looking like it'd been used to dig sand castles at the beach. With this product, it looked like new after about an hour and a half of rubbing.
Once your iPod's looking great again, it'd be a good idea to invest in an iPod case. There are a plethora of these on the market, so it's a bit hard to choose the right one. If you're into looks and you'll be real careful with your iPod, some of the leather models are nice. However, they can cause a small amount of scratches, so if you're going to be putting your iPod in your backpack and need to make sure it's thoroughly protected, buy one of the silicone cases. Apple also makes iPod socks, which are, well, socks that you put on your iPod when it's not in use. Don't waste your money. These are WAY overpriced, and you can just pick up some little kids' socks that'll do the same thing. Also, they might profess your love for Spiderman or Barbie in the process.
iPodHacks.com
This fine site lists tons of utilities for every type of iPod, and it's updated all the time. It's fun to scroll through the database on this stie and check out all the cool stuff your iPod can do, and feel superior to the suckers that bought other mp3 players. It has a lot of programs to remove mp3s from your iPod and move them to your computer—free of charge. It also has links to sites that are able to put the Linux operating system on your older model iPod (3rd generation and below, with 4th generation support on the way). Having Linux on your iPod lets you use some cool programs, such as the ability to record in mono from the earphone jack of your iPod.
iPodhacks.com also allows you to download the latest version of iPod firmware, which adds functionality to the iPod (for example, the latest version of the firmware when I was writing this added support for Podcasts to the iPod).
Pimp My iPod
With these cool gadgets and programs, you can make sure that you're not only cooler than other mp3 player owners, but that you're cooler than other iPod owners. Grab a few of the freebies I've listed here, and if you can afford it, you might as well pitch in a little bit for some of the way cool not-so-freebies. But please; take it easy on the camcorder.