Today, I’ve got this massive stack of clothes to iron… bleh :(

To make the experience a tiny little bit more pleasant, I’m listening to every podcast on my iPod I hadn’t listened to yet…

Great time to catch up with all that stuff… but great frustration too!

A typical podcast has an average length of 15 minutes. And when the iPod is done with playing it, it just goes back to the main menu. Yes, that’s the MAIN menu, not the podcast feed you where in, not the podcast menu either! It’s all the way back to the main menu!

So you need to drill down into the podcast menu again and then into the feed you were listening too, select the next podcast you want to listen to and then, finally, you can continue to listen…

Wouldn’t it have made sense for the iPod to automagically play the next episode in the feed I was listening too!? Isn’t the whole podcast concept somewhat supposed to mimic a radio with better programs? Do you need to click on your radio in order to listen to the next show?

Apple seems to have thought this through… at some point… but only halfway I guess: you can actually press play when a podcast feed is selected and the whole feed will get played. But in this case you’ll suffer 2 major problems:

  • You’ll listen to the feed in reverse chronological order. And you’ll hear feedback on the previous episode before you hear the referred to episode! :(
  • You’ll listen to everything, including the episodes you’ve already listened to before…

This second point is something else that has been bugging me for a while: there’s no way you can see on your iPod what episodes you’ve already listened to and which ones are new.

Each episode definitely needs a 3 state icon in front of its title, indicating wether it’s unplayed, partially played or completely played.

Comments from long ago:

Comment from: YES YES YES

You are right. I could SCREAM this is such a stupid interface Apple has designed! What the H*LL were they thinking??? I think they must have been on DRUGS! It’s INSANE to do it any other way than like a normal playlist: When the podcast is finished, GO TO THE NEXT ONE. Now, if you select auto repeat with a podcast, you get slightly different results than Francois, namely that the SAME podcast will repeat OVER and OVER and OVER so you have to manually stop it, select the next podcast and continue. Aaaaarrrrrrrgggggg! Completely awful that interface. We should submit an online petition to Apple to change the interface! Maybe if we get enough people, they will listen!

2006-10-14 03-29