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Jerjerrod · Nov 12, 2001, 12:28 PM

Whoa! I just noticed the subtle antialiasing in the firewire logo on the iPod screen, and the shades of grey in the battery guage. It's barely used, but the thing does shades of grey. This thing is just BEGGING to be hacked for other uses. I can't wait to see what people come up with.

Speaking of which, if this runs the Pixo OS, could it run other programs designed to run on Pixo? Do other programs even exist? Since it was designed for cell phones, could one load software to manage an address book? This thing is just begging to be a mini-PDA, too.

JFischel · Nov 12, 2001, 01:33 PM

I'm waiting to get home and play with my iPod that was just delivered...but what I was hoping to see was some kind of visual plug-in just like the visuals in iTunes for the iPod screen...I think that would be dope...Oh well, just a few more hours.

Josh

cdhostage · Nov 12, 2001, 02:16 PM

I wonder if running visuals would tax the processor on the iPod... also I wonder if they would drain the battery faster.

Jerjerrod · Nov 12, 2001, 04:02 PM

Originally posted by cdhostage:
<STRONG>I wonder if running visuals would tax the processor on the iPod... also I wonder if they would drain the battery faster.</STRONG>

I wouldn't think this would be the case. The calculations to make all those pretty patterns would seem to be fairly simple to begin with, and made much, much simpler by a tiny screen with only 2 or 4 bits per pixel.

I don't recall the specs, but I'd imagine the processor in the iPod is at least as powerful as that of the Newton's (emate300, and 2k's that is). Those machines could play pseudo-quicktime movies, as can Palm's. My Palm, cranked all the way up with afterburner, runs at 32 MHz.

Those quicktime-ish files are probably bottlenecked by the speed at which they can be read from ram, and not the processing power needed to interpret the data and draw them to the screen.

Since visualizations wouldn't need to read anything from disk or ram (beyond the mp3, which is already taken care of by the player) I wouldn't think that a bit of extra code to make a pretty design would be that taxing to performance or to battery life.

The fly in the ointment is iTunes. I have a 733Mhz G4, and I still get really crappy framerates in iTunes visualizations. At least, compared to my dell running winamp's plugins, which cruise along at speeds iTunes can't dream of even when I'm doing forty other things on the dell at the same time. My guess is that this performance tax with iTunes is specific to iTunes or the MacOS, and that the principle that visualizations wouldn't be too taxing would hold true for the iPod.

Then again, this is all just conjecture and me talking out of my ass, so who knows.

The real kicker is that if we had visualizations but no breakout, we'd be complaining about how they didn't put an easter egg game in it.

command-tab · Nov 12, 2001, 05:35 PM

I heard that the drive is just a simple HFS+ format, and that MP3's are in an invisible folder on it. Is this true?

Jerjerrod · Nov 12, 2001, 05:41 PM

Originally posted by command-tab:
<STRONG>I heard that the drive is just a simple HFS+ format, and that MP3's are in an invisible folder on it. Is this true?</STRONG>

Yup.

Grab TinkerTool or some other proggie for working with invisible files to get at them.