iLifeZone Episode 37
The iPhone
Run Time: 36:26

Scott Bourne www.podango.com and www.applephoneshow.com
Chris Breen MacWorld Playlist Magazine and iPhone Central at Macworld.com

Let's have a little bit about the iPhone. I know what you're thinking... You've heard enough, but humor us for a bit :-) We're not doing news and commentary. This is all about tips, tricks, and other fun stuff. We're going to help you get a handle on all the things you neglected while having a nice spacious and capacious 30 gig, 60 gig, or 80 gig iPod.

Chris says it's similar to having a Nano as far as how you have to manage it. The difference, of course, is that you have video on the iPhone also. For example, you can sync movies one by one, but why would you want to? iTunes has ways of dealing with just that sort of situation.

On the bottom of the iPod feature of the iPhone is a row of icons. If you click the word More, you see a bunch more options (wow!). You now have the option of checking out podcasts, genres, and so on. That isn't all. In the upper left corner of the screen, there's an edit button. You can drag different features down to the bottom bar and set it up so that it's only the features you need. Scott likes this feature. Chris thinks it's better than what Apple chose (for example... Songs? Jeez). It's very fast to tap on the list of letters on the right, but still. Chris listens to entire albums more often, so he added the Albums button down to the button. To replace, just drag an icon over an old one and now you'll have only the features you need.

When you select an album, you'll see a thumbnail image of the album. If you tap the upper right corner, you'll have the track list, and you can select a track. Tap a track to play it.

Scott thinks that coverflow is really cool also. To see coverflow, just flip the iPhone on its side, and you can see the album covers. Tap the album, and you'll see the track list on the back. Tap the song and you're playing. Scott says that's a feature he uses to show off the iPhone to n00bs.

In iTunes, you can control what does and doesn't sync to your iPhone. Chris has a smart playlist that limits his music to 128kbps AAC, the song must be between 3 and 5 minutes long. For TV shows, he has a playlist that has a play count of 0 so he only gets new shows, and then he sorts by season. You can then watch whole seasons in the order they air. Chris leaves about 3 episodes on his iPhone. A nice feature of the iPhone is that after you watch a video, it asks if you want to delete it. If you say yes, you've freed up the space. It won't delete it from iTunes, just from the iPhone.

So what exactly are Smart Playlists?

Smart Playlists are playlists that rely on some logical criteria. Instead of putting songs in, you put references to songs and they're played as they come up. (For example, you can have a smart playlist that has only 5-star rated songs. That will auto update for you as you rate songs without you having to add the actual songs into the playlist). You can limit playlists by size, too, and then of course you can sync only that playlist. The nice thing about smart playlists is that they take up no more hard disk space and you aren't duplicating them at all.

Scott often recommends that you check out the Purchased or Recently Added playlists for ideas of how Smart Playlists work. Chris points out that it isn't always the case that the protected playlists will have your protected media. To get around that, Chris created a Smart Playlist that searches for anything with the kind that contains "Protected." You can refine this down to not include music videos. Note that this doesn't include the new non-DRM iTunes Plus tracks because they're listed as "Purchased AAC audio files." You could theoretically just add a second condition to your playlist and that would grab anything that's either Purchased or Protected.

You can find out more about this stuff from Chris at Playlist Mag. Here's a great one on how to make really good smart playlists. And this one is pretty good too! Even though the second one is geared toward the Shuffle, the same concepts do apply.

Chris is working on an iPhone book as we speak, and he already has a few books out:

The iPod & iTunes Pocket Guide
Secrets of the iPod

The Pocket Guide is really helpful if you want to learn how to manage your media, regardless of what kind of device you're using. Help Chris get rich, will ya? :-)

Another integral piece of the iPhone software arsenal is iPhoto because you can sync from iPhoto to iPhone. Scott does this to demo the iPhone (Vinny: So do I!) n00bs. Looking at your photo library on the iPhone rocks. The navigation is great. You can do slideshows, flip it, zoom it, and flick from one to the next. That always wows people. You can make albums and smart albums in iPhoto too. They're similar to their playlist equivalents in iTunes. When you go to the "Photos" tab in iTunes, you'll see a list of all the albums you have in your iPhoto library and you can select as many as you have space for on your iPhone. The neat thing is that you can do this by folders also, and you don't have to do everything through iPhoto. Individual folders inside a main folder, can be used like albums. In Aperture, you can do the same thing. Either sync it directly in iTunes, or sync them through a folder.

You can even sync RAW images. iTunes will not sync the RAW files automatically. They're converted to JPG and resized to be optimal for the iPhone. You won't end up taking up your entire iPhone with photos.

You can also sync photos back from the iPhone to the computer (meaning photos you took). Whatever you use to import your camera pictures, it'll work with your iPhone. One of the more annoying things is that every time you drop your iPhone in the cradle, iPhoto will pop up. You can find the setting to change that in the Image Capture app. Launch it. In the Preferences menu, there's an option that says WHEN A CAMERA IS CONNECTED OPEN __________________. Change that to "No Application" and click OK. Voila. No more autoloading of iPhoto. The downside of this is that if you want to import images from your digital camera or iPhone, you'll now have to open iPhoto, but it's better than having iPhoto pop up every time you sync your iPhone. At the end of the import process in Aperture or iPhoto, you have the option of emptying the storage on the phone of photos. You can leave them there, but taking them out saves space.

If you want to put non-iLife stuff on your iPhone, you still have an option. One of the features removed from the iPhone was disk mode. To get around this, you can buy a program called iPhoneDrive for $10 from Ecamm Networks. You can't access your music, video, etc. But you can add stuff to your free space. The caveat is that if you want to use this on other Macs, it must be installed on that Mac. Secondly, and not that it matters to us (heheheh) is that there's no Windows version of this app.

Safari is a very good mobile web browser. Scott created a new bookmark folder on his desktop version of Safari and set that to be the folder that's sync'ed to his iPhone. That eliminates having a glut of bookmarks on the iPhone and gives some control over what you want added. One good use for this is to keep out sites that use Flash or where the content is too rich to load over the EDGE network. There are a ton of sites now that are iPhone friendly that have widgets and portals to your traditional sites (try MockDock to see what we're talking about). Another great tip is to rotate the screen to get some added space. You can also double tap on columns to resize them to fit on the screen. And, of course, you can pinch and unpinch :-)

Scott has been using his iPhone for keeping track of movie times and such at local theaters in San Francisco. Chris points out that it's not that the iPhone does things that no phone has ever done, but it does a lot of things that phones have always done better (for the most part) than other phones do them. Scott points out that us geeks are really using all the features of the iPhone whereas with old phones, the UI was so unintuitive you don't "get" it.

Scott notes that this falls in line with iLife in how you don't need a manual to use it. Chris contends that the iPhone may actually be even easier to use than iLife because you don't have to dig forever to find something cool. There are very few functions that are non-obvious and hidden.

That covers it for this episode. Thanks everyone!

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This episode was sponsored by Overstock.com and ShieldZone.

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The next show lands on August 20, 2007. For more information email us at info@ilifezone.com.

Thanks also to Vincent Ferrari for the shownotes!

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