Customizatoin

[Tlak]

I would love to see in 2.1/3.0 (but for Class iPods..I don't want my 5gb left out) the ability to customize everything through a computer-side program that would work like RealBasic when you build your interface.

What you would have would be a palette on one side with an iPod screen in the middle. You could drag features from the palette to the screen and arrage links so that the Menu Item titled "Notes" would take you directly to a note file/contact on on classic iPods. It would be great if you could add your own grayscale graphics. (I know it's possible to do grayscale on classic iPods...when you update the software, it shows a firewire cable in multiple shades of gray) You could set your own custom startup picture and add graphics wherever you wanted.

It'd be even better to be able to write your own instructions for links, so that if you had a button called "Top 20 Minutes", you could write code that would search for 20 minutes of the top-rated songs. Of course, they'd have to add support for creating games. :D

I realize part of what makes the iPod great is its simplicity, but I also want it to do everything at the same time. Maybe they could have an option like the Finder does--"Simple Interface" would be the one now, and "Advanced Interface" would be totally versatile. Of course, none of this will probably happen, but I would love my iPod even more if it did.

[KeaneE04]

Actually, the true solution to all of this: Have apple release a developers kit for the old ipods. All it needs is a programming guide and a compiler, both of which they have! This way, an open source community would be created, no more apple support would be needed for the old ipods (and no more griping by us winpod users for 1.3). This would mean a larger dev team for the new ipods, best for both groups!

This has been my idea since i got the thing, give the ipod to the people who could make it better! Its like the Unix/Linux comparison, what apple is doing is similar to what Unix was all about (basically a dead operating system, only a very few pieces left over), verses the completely open source linux, which is the second most widely used OS in the world. (and easily the best os).

the way i figure, someone is going to figure out how to create our own firmware upgrades one of these days, and it will become open source anyway, apple's best bet is to give us the programming tools, so they can still control us a little more.