Saturday, August 9, 2008

iPod Visualizer


Dear Cupertino,

I wish the iPod had a visualizer. If iTunes has it, and most other media players on the market have it, I see no reason why the iPod doesn't have it.

Even if it were something that we could look at and go 'ooh' and 'aah' while we're playing our music, even something as simple as constantly changing album art (ala the iTunes Artwork screen saver in Mac OS X) would suffice.

Thanks,
Dear Cupertino Reader.

Editorial note: I think I know why Apple hasn't added a visualizer to the iPod's growing list of features... Battery life is the main concern here. If you take a look at your CPU usage when you've got the iTunes visualizer turned on, you'll see that it does take up a decent amount of CPU time - something that impacts on how much battery life you have. Of course, in a portable device such as the iPod and even the iPhone, battery life is paramount - so features that unnecessarily eat CPU are cut out. I'm sure if you somehow manage to take a look inside the iPod OS, you'll see code that is as efficient as possible - all to save those magical clock cycles.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I understand that. I have tired to my share of over clocking cpu's to run visualizer and a sepparet program. But for those of us nut ball's who want one when bored or those of us who have the video cored that conects to a tv and have the charger (for the classics cord but works with 5g) or for those with chargers on hand and bored they should have an app to buy it's not like they wont make a profit its like running a game for a long time but funner to watch and NOT do lol

a random John said...

One possible solution is to make a movie out of your visualization. I've written a custom visualizer called Manifesto and in order to demo it I used Screenium to make movies, which I've posted to YouTube and Vimeo. I'm able to watch the YouTube movies any time on my iPhone and I can load the movies onto it as well.

Additionally I've considered writing a visualizer for iPhone but there isn't a pluggin API so it would require a standalone app. Either way it would eat up the battery pretty seriously. I assume the movies eat it up as well, though probably not as quickly.