Chapter 10. The iPod as Personal Assistant
The early chapters in this book were all about showing you how your iPod works and how you can fill it up with music, movies, photos, eBooks, and more. But if you think that’s all the iPod can do, think again. For instance, that gorgeous color screen on the Touch is happy to display your address book and calendar. The Classic can list your contacts and show you your schedule.
And that’s just for starters. If you’re looking for a handsome timepiece, your iPod can function as a world clock when you’re on the road, and as a stopwatch when you’re on the track. iPods can now record your thoughts when you dictate them into the microphone. The Nano can even count your steps and then tell you how many calories you burned by just walking around.
If you’ve got an iPod Nano, Shuffle, or Classic, you can use it as an external hard drive for hauling around monster files, like PowerPoint presentations and quarterly reports.
So if you’ve mastered the iPod’s AV Club talents and you’re ready for new challenges, this chapter is for you—it’ll show you even more ways to use your ‘Pod.
The iPod as Address Book
Putting a copy of your contacts file—also known as your computer’s address book—on your iPod is easy, as long as you have up-to-date software. Windows users need to store their contacts in Outlook Express, Outlook 2003 or later, Windows Contacts, or the Windows Address Book (used by Outlook Express and some other email programs).
Mac folks need to have at least Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) and the Mac OS X Address Book (shown below), which Apple’s Mail program uses to stash names and numbers. You can also use Entourage 2004 or later, but you have to link before you sync: In Entourage, choose Preferences and then click Sync Services. Then turn on the checkboxes for sharing contacts and calendars with Address Book and iCal (Apple’s calendar program). Entourage shares the info, and Address Book and iCal sync it up.
The other thing you need for an on-the-go contacts list is the right type of iPod: a Touch or a Classic, or an older click-wheel Nano. Sadly, the small, square touchscreen Nano can’t display contacts, calendars, or notes.
To turn your iPod into a little black book, follow these steps:
Connect your iPod to your computer and click its icon in iTunes’ Source list. (If you use Outlook or Outlook Express, launch that now, too.)
In the main part of the iTunes window, click the Info tab.
Windows owners: Turn on the checkbox next to “Sync contacts from” and use the drop-down menu to choose the source program for your contacts. Mac owners: Turn on the “Sync Address Book contacts” checkbox. If you want to sync contact groups, select them from the “Selected groups” box. You can also choose to import the photos in your contacts files.
Click the Apply button in the lower-right corner of the iTunes window.
iTunes updates your iPod with the contact information stored in your address book. If you add new contacts while you have your iPod plugged in, choose File→Update iPod or click the Sync button in iTunes to move the new data over to your pocket player. When you decide someone doesn’t deserve to be in your contacts list anymore, delete her from your computer’s address book, and she’ll disappear from your iPod the next time you sync up.
To look up a pal on an iPod Touch, tap the Contacts icon on the Home screen and flick your way to the person’s name. Tap that name to see his contact info. You can even send that contact data by email—just tap the Share Contact button. On the Classic (and older click-wheel Nanos), choose iPod→Extras→Contacts and scroll to the name of the person. Press the center button, and you’ll see his address card pop up onscreen.
Tip
If you have an iPod Touch, you get a few extra sync options for your contact info. First, you can sync contacts from your Google Gmail and Yahoo Mail address books. To do that, go into iTunes’ Info tab and click the Configure button. Enter your Gmail or Yahoo user name and password (you need an Internet connection to sync). Second, because you can enter contacts directly on the Touch, the Info settings give you the option to pull the contacts you create there and add them to your online Google or Yahoo address book the next time you sync.
The iPod as Calendar
Just as iTunes can pluck contacts out of your computer’s address book, so it can snag and sync a copy of your desktop’s daily or monthly schedule to your iPod Touch, Classic, or older click-wheel Nano—if you use Outlook on your PC or iCal on your Mac. (You can also use Entourage 2004 or later by choosing, in Entourage, Preferences→Sync Services and turning on the option to have Entourage share events with iCal.)
To get your calendar connected, fire up iTunes and then follow these steps:
Connect your iPod to your computer and click the iPod’s icon when it shows up in the Source list.
In the main part of the iTunes window, click the Info tab. Scroll down past Contacts to Calendars.
Turn on the checkbox next to “Sync calendars from Microsoft Outlook” (Windows) or “Sync iCal calendars” (Mac). If you have multiple calendars, select the ones you want to copy.
In the lower-right corner of the iTunes window, click the Apply button.
If iTunes doesn’t automatically start updating your iPod with your datebook, choose File→Sync iPod. If you haven’t changed any sync settings and you’re just updating contact info, iTunes’ Apply button turns into a Sync button, and you can click that instead of going up to Menuville.
After the sync, it’s time to check your dates. On the iPod Touch, tap the Calendar icon on the Home screen. Tap List, Day, or Month to see your schedule for the short or long term, or tap the Today button to see the current day’s events. List view shows all your upcoming appointments one after the other. In Month view, your Touch represents events with black dots and lists them by day below the calendar grid. Tap the black triangles on either side of the month name to advance forward or backward through the months. Tap the 
button to add an event.
To look up your busy schedule on an iPod Classic or pre-2010 Nano, choose iPod→Extras→Calendars. Select the name of the calendar you want to examine and press the round center button. On the Classic, you get a blue-and-gray grid with tiny red flags planted on the days you have something scheduled; older Nanos list the day’s events under the grid. Use the scroll wheel to navigate to a particular day, and press the center button to see the details.
A few other calendar-keeping tips:
If you use the To Do list function in your calendar program, your action items appear in their own place on the Classic and older Nano. Choose iPod→Extras→Calendars→To Do’s.
You can have your iPod remind you of upcoming events. The Touch flashes a beeping onscreen alert keyed to the event reminders in your synced calendar. You can set your own alert on the Touch by selecting an event and tapping the Edit button. Tap the Alert screen and pick a suitable amount of advance-warning time. To turn on Nag Alerts on the Classic and older Nano, choose iPod→Extras→Calendars→Alarms. You have your choice of Off, Beep, or None (the last displays a silent message onscreen).
Track Time: The iPod as Stopwatch
The iPod Touch, Nano, and Classic all have a Stopwatch feature riding alongside their great music and video capabilities. Using the iPod stopwatch is like using a regular stopwatch, except that the iPod can be a very expensive timer.
iPod Touch and Nano
To get to the Touch’s stylish full-screen stopwatch, tap Home→Clock→Stopwatch; the Clock app may be tucked away in the Utilities folder of iPod Touches running iOS 4.1. On the newest Nano, tap the Clock icon on the Home screen and flick from right to left past the standard clock to get to the stopwatch.
To start timing yourself on either the Touch or the Nano, tap the green Start button. The timer starts counting, and the Start button turns into a red Stop button. (Tap that when you’re done timing.) If you’re running a series of laps, tap the gray Lap button each time you finish a turn on the track. The iPod records your time for that lap and then starts timing your next one.
The iPod displays the time for the lap in progress above the overall session timer. It lists the time for completed laps below the timer, so you can track your workout. The timer keeps ticking even if you tap your way to another program to, say, pick a playlist. When you return to the stopwatch, it’s still going.
If you need to pause the timer, tap the Stop button; to pick up where you left off counting, tap Start again. When you’re finally done with your exercise, tap the Stop button to halt the clock. To clear the times from the screen, hit the gray Reset button. The Touch doesn’t store your performance history, but the Nano displays your last session’s results when you tap the 
button.
Tip
The Touch has the run-tracking Nike + iPod software built right into it (though you still need to buy the special Nike shoes and the shoe sensor that transmits your steps to the iPod). To monitor a jog, turn on the tracker; tap Home→Settings→Nike + iPod. Nano users need a snap-on receiver for their ‘Pod ($29 for the kit at www.apple.com/ipod/nike), but once enabled, the player tracks your workout more scientifically than any personal trainer could—and you get to play your own music.
iPod Classic
The Stopwatch feature on this iPod not only clocks your time around the track, it keeps track of your running sessions. To turn your Classic or older Nano into a timer, choose Extras→Stopwatch. Here’s what you do from there:
Press the Play/Pause button to begin. The iPod begins to clock you by hours, minutes, seconds, and milliseconds.
After each lap, tap the iPod’s center button to record that time; the iPod lists the time underneath the overall session time. The screen displays up to three lap times.
Press Play/Pause to stop the clock. When you’re done timing, press the Menu button. That takes you back to the Stopwatch menu. Here you can click Resume to start up the clock again.
If you want a new session with the stopwatch, select New Timer.
The iPod stores logs of your last several workouts. To review your progress, scroll to Extras→Stopwatch, where you see previous sessions listed by date and time of day. Scroll and select a session to see a list of your lap times, with the shortest, longest, and average time noted on top. Press the iPod’s center button to delete a log.
Tip
The Touch and Nano also have a Timer feature, which is great for cooking. Nestled right next to the Stopwatch, the Touch Timer works just as you’d expect: Pick your countdown time using the virtual spinwheels and press Start. On the Nano, flick to the screen after the Stopwatch screen, set your time wheels, and press Start.
Count Steps: The iPod Nano as Pedometer
In addition to its Stopwatch feature, the iPod Nano includes another treat for fitness buffs: a colorful pedometer that tells you how many steps you’ve taken—since you turned on the pedometer, anyway. (It measures steps based on readings from the iPod’s built-in motion sensor.) The pedometer also displays how many calories you burn in the process. All this careful bookkeeping is intended to help with your workout goals.
To set up the pedometer for the first time:
On the Home screen, tap Fitness→Pedometer.
Use the onscreen wheels to spin up your weight. (If you need to change your weight later, go to Settings→Pedometer→Weight.)
Tap the Start button to begin counting your steps, Nano-style (this also turns the Start button into a Stop button). A little shoe icon in the Nano’s menu bar tells you that the pedometer is on and counting away.
Tap the Stop button when you’re done so you can see the total number of steps you took (and calories you burned) for the day.
You can see a history of your recorded steps by tapping Fitness→History. When the History screen appears, tap the Personal Bests, Workout Totals, or the month whose walking stats you want to review. The session history lists your workout duration, stop and start times, calories burned, and total steps for the day and week.
As the most fitness-oriented iPod in the bunch, the latest Nano lets you set a goal for how much walking you want to do in a day. From the Home screen, tap Settings→Pedometer→Daily Step Goal. Tap the Off button to On, use the spinny wheels to dial up a goal, and then tap Done. The Nano displays your progress on the pedometer’s main screen so you can see how you’re doing.
Serious fitness buffs might want to get the $29 iPod + Nike Sport Kit (www.apple.com/ipod/nike) for the Nano. It includes a special shoe sensor, uploads your workout data to Nike’s website, and offers plenty of power music mixes.
Voice Memos: The iPod as Audio Recorder
The Touch, Nano, and 160-gigabyte iPod Classic don’t just play sound, they record it, too, thanks to their Voice Memos feature. If you have an older, microphone-free version of the Touch (new Touches have a built-in mic), a Nano, or a Classic, however, you need to invest in Apple’s optional Earphones with Remote and Mic, (available for $29 at www.apple.com/ipodstore) or a compatible third-party microphone.
Once you have your microphone in place, you can start your recording session:
On the Touch, tap the Voice Memos icon on the Home screen; it’s inside the Utilities folder on new models. On the Nano, tap the Voice Memos icon that appears when you plug in the mic. On the Classic, choose iPod→Voice Memos.
To start recording, tap the red dot on the Touch or Nano screen. On the Classic, choose Voice Memos→Start Recording. You can pause your recording by tapping the Touch/Nano’s onscreen pause icon or by pressing the Play/Pause button on the Classic’s click wheel. Tap the pause icon on the Touch or Nano to re-start recording; on the Classic, choose Resume to continue.
On the Touch or Nano, tap the black square on the right side of the screen to stop recording. On the Classic, choose Stop and Save. To play back a recording, tap the
icon on the Touch or Nano; on the Classic, select the recording from the Voice Memos menu.
To delete a recording on the Touch, select it on the Voice Memos menu and then press the Delete button. The Touch has a Share button on the same screen that lets you send the recording as an email attachment. If you tap the recording’s 
icon, you get a Trim Memo button that lets you edit the clip. On this same screen, tap the recording’s name to assign it a predefined label, like “Interview” or “Lecture.”
To delete a clip from the Nano, tap the icon. Tap the Edit button on the next screen, and then hit the 
icon before you confirm the deletion. Just as on the Touch, you can label a clip by tapping its name and then tapping Label.
To erase a recording from the Classic, press the center button to select it and then choose Delete from the menu. If your iPod is set to sync, iTunes copies your recordings to its Voice Memos playlist. You can find the audio files on Nanos and Classics enabled for disk use (The iPod as Portable Hard Drive), in the iPod’s Recordings folder.
Tick-Tock: The iPod as a World Clock
As discussed earlier in this book, all iPods (except for the screenless Shuffle) have built-in clocks with a simple alarm feature. The Touch and the Classic, however, let you set multiple clocks for different time zones, each with its own alarm. If you travel frequently, you can create a clock for each destination instead of constantly fiddling with time zone settings. Cool.
The iPod should already have one clock—the one you created when you first set up your player and selected your time zone.
Add a Clock on Your iPod Touch
If you want to rearrange your list of clocks, tap the Edit button and use the three-stripe gripstrip () to drag them into the order you want.
To delete a clock, tap the Edit button, tap the icon next to the clock’s name, and then tap the Delete button to whack that clock from the list.
Add a Clock to Your iPod Classic
Go to iPod→Extras→Clocks and then press the iPod’s center button.
You’ll see your local clock. Press the center button again to select Add. (Choose Edit if you have just one clock, but want to change it.)
On the next screen, select a world region, like North America, Europe, Africa, or Asia. Some categories on the Region menu are less obvious: Select Atlantic if you live in Iceland or the Azores; choose Pacific if you live in Hawaii, Guam, or Pago Pago.
Select a region, and the next screen displays a list of major cities and the current time in that part of the world. Scroll and select the city of your choice. Once you do, the iPod creates a clock named after the city and showing the local time. It adds the clock to your Clock menu.
If you want to change a clock, select it and press the iPod’s center button to bring up the onscreen options for Edit and Delete. Choose Edit, which takes you back through the whole “pick a region, pick a city” exercise.
If you decide you have too many clocks and don’t need that Tora Bora timekeeper after all, select the unwanted clock from the list. Press the center button on the iPod, scroll down to Delete, and then press the center button again to erase time.
For owners of the older iPod Nanos (the ones that sport the click wheel), you can add clocks by following the steps above.
The iPod as Portable Hard Drive
If being a portable entertainment system and organizer isn’t enough, your iPod Nano, Shuffle, or Classic can also serve as a portable hard drive to shuttle documents, presentations, and other files from one computer to another. (The Touch doesn’t naturally work as an external drive; to get it to do that, you have to use a utility program like TouchCopy, mentioned back in Chapter 5.)
To give your iPod these file-toting powers:
Plug your ‘Pod into your computer.
When its icon shows up in iTunes’ Source list, select it, and then click the Summary tab in the main iTunes window.
Turn on the checkbox next to “Enable disk use” in the Options area of the Summary screen. To set a limit for non-music storage on the storage-shy Shuffle, spin its triangle open, click the Music icon, and then click the Autofill settings button (Fill Up Any iPod Automatically). Drag the slider to the desired amount of space.
In the lower-right corner of the iTunes window, click the Apply button. If you forget and try to move on to something else, iTunes reminds you that you modified an iPod setting and prompts you to OK the change.
Your iPod now shows up as an icon in the My Computer area of Windows or on the Mac desktop. You can drag files on and off the icon just as you would files for any other drive connected to your computer. You can also double-click the iPod icon to create folders for your files. Delete files by dragging them to the Recycle Bin or the Trash. Steer clear of the folders labeled Photos (and, on the Classic, the folders tagged Calendars, Contacts, and Notes); the iPod uses those folders to store the eponymous items. (Turn the page to see what you can do with the Classic’s Notes folder.)
Keep in mind that once you turn your iPod into an external hard drive, you have to treat it like one by formally ejecting the drive from iTunes before disconnecting your ‘Pod. (Do so by clicking the Eject icon next to the iPod’s name in the iTunes Source list and you’ll avoid huffy alert boxes from your operating system about improper device removal.)
Your iPod keeps music, movies, and other iTunes stuff in a special, invisible area of the player, so you can use all those features even when you use your ‘Pod as file courier. (And syncing your music with a PC or Mac doesn’t affect the computer files, either.) But remember that the more you fill up your iPod with data files, the less room you have for entertainment—and vice versa.
Note
Windows can’t read the Mac disk format, but a Mac can read a Windows-formatted iPod Classic or Nano. If you want to use your iPod with both systems, plug it into the PC first and let iTunes format your ‘Pod for Windows. The Shuffle and the Touch work with both PCs and Macs right out of the gate.
The iPod as eBook and Text Reader
Want to read a great book or review notes on your iPod Touch or Classic? Both of these iPods can work as pocket-size eReaders.
Read eBooks on the iPod Touch
Even before the App Store came into being, the iPod Touch offered ways to read chunks of text onscreen, whether it was from notes synced from Outlook or Apple’s OS X Mail program, or documents stashed in Safari-friendly online lockers, like Google Docs.
The arrival of the App Store a few years ago made reading on the Touch even easier, with plenty of 99-cent books and even a free Shakespeare app, which puts the complete works of the Bard (sonnets, too!) within reach of your fingertip.
But reading got easier—and more contemporary—once again with the introduction of online bookstore apps. Now you can buy, download, and read current best sellers, general titles, and free books on your Touch. These free apps—namely Apple’s iBooks app, Amazon’s Kindle app, and Barnes & Noble’s Nook app—not only bring you the latest eBooks, they make them easy to read, with adjustable font sizes, tinted backgrounds, and instant bookmarks.
To start an eLibrary on your Touch, download your favorite book dealer’s app from the App Store. Once it’s installed, tap its Store, Get Books, or Shop button to browse, buy, and download books. If you choose Apple’s iBooks app (shown here), your purchases get billed to your iTunes account. You can read them right on the Touch and back them up to your computer with iTunes. iBooks also lets you read PDF files that you copy over from your computer (by dragging them into iTunes and syncing your ‘Pod). To find the files, tap the PDFs button on iBooks’ bookshelf.
When you buy books from Amazon or Barnes & Noble, you need to set up an account with those sites with your billing information. If you already have an account, just use your usual name and password to log in and download eBook purchases.
Read Text Files on the iPod Classic
It’s a little-known feature, but the iPod Classic (and older click-wheel Nanos) can also display basic text files onscreen. You create these iPod notes from plain text files (those with a .txt extension), like those from Windows Notepad or TextEdit on a Mac. (You can’t read full-fledged word-processing documents from Microsoft Word or AppleWorks unless you save them as plain text files.)
To use the iPod’s Notes feature:
Connect your iPod to your computer as an external drive (flip back two pages to find out how).
Once you save your text files in the proper plain-text format, open your iPod by double-clicking its icon in the Computer window in Windows (the My Computer window for Windows XP) or on the Mac desktop.
Drag the files into the Notes folder on your iPod.
After you copy your files, eject the iPod from iTunes by clicking the Eject button next to its name in the Source list, or use the Eject button in the corner of the iTunes window.
When you’re ready to start reading, choose Extras→Notes. You’ll see the names of your text files listed in the Notes menu. Scroll to the one you want, and then press the iPod’s center button to bring it up onscreen.
As you read, you can use the scroll wheel to page up and down through the file. Press the Menu button to close the file and return to the list of Notes files.
Using the iPod as a text reader is a handy way to bring your grocery list with you so you can rock while you shop. But to browse prose more challenging than “Buy Pampers,” swing by Project Gutenberg’s website at www.gutenberg.us. Here you can download thousands of public-domain literary works as plain text files and transfer them to your iPod’s Notes folder. (The iPod can display files up to only 4 kilobytes in size; to find shareware programs that let you read much longer files, visit www.missingmanuals.com/cds/ipodtmm9/.)