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Monday, January 14, 2008

picking up where Apple has left off

In the third generation of iPod nano, Apple has included the famous Cover Flow feature. But what if your iPod belongs to the generation before this? Well, AFAIK Cover Flow is not available. Either Apple would like the owners to upgrade or the hardware is simply not powerful enough. Pick your battle.

The solution: use Rockbox. It is a firmware replacement not only for Apple iPods but for a wide range of other popular music players. Since some time ago, it sports the PictureFlow plugin (still in continous development) which has the same idea as Cover Flow. This plugin is based on my PictureFlow Qt widget, something that I have mentioned before. The obligatory screenshot (courtesy of Jonas):

The good thing is, it is not limited to those iPods. At least, in the wiki page, it is reported that this PictureFlow plugin works for (among others) Sandisk Sansa e200/c200, Toshiba Gigabeat, Cowon iAudio X5, and iriver H300. For proofs, you can check some YouTube clips related to PictureFlow, for example:

5 comments:

dhaumann said...

When I researched about RockBox I read several times that the battery lifetimes is less than with the original iPod software - unfortunately.

Ariya Hidayat said...

@dhaumann: Likely because a few features are implemented in pure software. There is no really elegant solution, until someone would make and sell a "fully open" music player.

Unknown said...

You refer to "the previous generation nano". According to the front page of the Rockbox website the 2nd generation nano is not supported.

If anybody knows different I'd love to know since I have a 2nd gen nano that I'd like to get Rockbox on

Ariya Hidayat said...

@Richard: 2nd and 3rd Nano have an encrypted firmware. But, keep on eye on this project: http://home.gna.org/linux4nano/index.html

Vanda said...

PictureFlow works on my Motorola ROKR E2. matur nuwun dude :) and also Rockbox of course, hehe