Pod2Go - Transfer useful data to an iPod

Mar 22, '05 12:46:00PM

Contributed by: robg

Pod2Go icon The macosxhints Rating:
9 of 10
[Score: 9 out of 10]

If, like me, your iPod is nearly always with you, but the same is not necessarily true of your PDA and/or phone, you might be interested in Pod2Go. This cool little application lets you put a large assortment of data on your iPod. You can load everything from news, weather, movie, stocks, driving directions, horoscopes, text snippets, data from apps like iCal and Address Book, and even song lyrics. As seen in the screenshot (larger version), the interface is elegant yet powerful, with each icon across the top controlling that specific data source. The shot shows the Applications icon, which controls what data you'd like to copy from certain Apple applications.

I've played with all of the tools now, and they all work quite well. You'll get varying results with some of the news feeds, as they're dependent on the various sites' RSS feeds. If you use the macosxhints.com feed, for instance, you'll get the hint title and the first 200 words of the hint. Unless it's a really short hint, that's probably not tremendously useful. Many sites will actually send headlines only, which is similarly not too useful on an iPod. But others send the entire article, which is perfect.

Of the available tools, I found Movies, Weather, and Directions most useful. Having the movie list for our nearby theaters on the iPod is very convenient, and I've loaded the forecast weather for cities around the country where I have friends and relatives. The Directions bit is useful if (like me) you get lost regularly and don't have a nav system in your car. I've loaded a few spots I occasionally visit in downtown Portland, yet never seem to remember exactly which block they're on, nor which of the numerous one-way streets go which direction.

I had a bit of trouble at one point with getting new data to synch to the iPod; quitting the app and restarting it didn't seem to help. What finally worked was to quit the application, then separately quit the menu extra it installs, then re-launch the program. The synch worked on the next try. Other than that one glitch, though, operation has been trouble-free.

I probably won't use most of the other tools all that often, but it's nice to know they're there. For example, I use .Mac for most of my synching needs with iCal and Address Book, but if you don't have a .Mac account, you can at least synch those things to an iPod using Pod2Go. You can also use the program as a backup tool and a basic launcher. In short, there's something there for nearly everyone who carries an iPod with them.

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Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20050322124656621