Four months later and it appears we kinda have working Smart Playlists on the ol’ iPhone. No more workaround!
After updating to iPhone firmware 3.1.3 and iTunes 9.0.3 it appears that changes to the status of smart playlists on the iPhone sync back to iTunes. No need to add ‘Playlist is Music’ to get the playlists to update!
A game, where everything is truly interactive. You can pick up anything, move anything with enough force. Now, a game with such open endedness will have a huge problem. How will the player know how to forward the game?
Just imaging that you awoke one day in the very room you sit in now, but you have no memory of where you’re at. you’d start to look around for clues, but where would you start?
That’s where actor controlled NPC’s (non-playable characters) come into play. These actors would be hired by the game company to ‘posess’ NPC’s to help move the story along. Each time would be different, each reacting to your actions/responses to thier input. Since they are hired by the company, they have a vested interest in seeing the continuity of the story progress.
(I’ve had this in my draft folder for far too long. Post or get off the pot – as they say.)
It’s been a crazy past few weeks. I meant to write about this sooner, but haven’t found the time.
The site not only looks a thousand times better (Bryce!) but the slick new navigation (Mark and Robert!) and the awesome content (Amy!) make this something I’m really proud to have worked on.
Here’s some of my personal favorite things we’ve added:
Consistent Left-hand Navigation – We now have highlighting of the current page you’re on (the little red arrow) and a nestled view of sub-pages. This looks much cleaner and is also a lot easier to navigate.
On the content creation side our users now have a clear understanding of how their site is organized and how to manage their content.
More space (wider layout)
We increased the width of the site by 25% giving us more space for content. Video can now be embedded at full SD resolution and pictures can now be much larger to boot. Along with a consistent placement of our navigation we no longer have to munge content around the right-hand navigation found in the previous design.
Flexible framework – We can nowdevelop new interactive elements
We’re already starting to add new ‘widgets’ to the content of our page. Things like what you see in the screenshot above. News tickers, embedded video carousels, instant response polls, you name it. All due to the new framework we’re using to display our content.
We’re not done adding additional features; like a new search engine, custom departmental banners and a mobile stylesheet!
Thanks again to everyone involved and for those who let me be a part of it. It feels good to be proud of one’s work.
I decided to take apart a broken Flip I had laying around. The screen had been damaged during a trip and would no longer display what was being recorded.
During the disassembly I was able to turn the Flip on and record a short video. It’s kinda cool to see how far it could be taken apart and still function.
I’ve put up a series of photographs of the process on my Flickr account with notes that I hope prove helpful for anyone attempting to do this on their own.
As for what will become of this Flip – maybe a hidden-camcorder-in-a-book mod?
Update #3: I was playing around with my smart playlists this morning and discovered an additional tidbit of information that may be useful for some. When syncing smart playlists, pay attention to which column you have the ordered the music by.
As you can see in the above screenshot I have my playlist sorted by ‘Date Added’ which is exactly how I want things ordered. Once I synced my iPhone playlist showed my music sorted by ‘Date Added’ as well.
If I were to have ‘Play Count’ selected as the column to sort by and then synced my iPhone, then that playlist would display the songs ordered by ‘Play Count’
I found this out while playing with the Apple Remote app for the iPhone/iPod Touch. The selected column to sort by also effects how playlists are displayed in the iPhone Remote App.
Update #2: New updates that came out kinda fix this problem. Read more here.
I noticed the other day that Smart Playlists were not syncing correctly to both my wife and my own iPhone.
I found one fix that allowed the sort order to be correct, but disabled the Live updating function of the Smart Playlists. Which meant that every time an attribute of the playlist was updated (Such as rating a new song for my ‘5 Stars’ playlist) nothing was updated upon syncing with my iPhone.
This totally defeats the purpose of a playlist that automagically updates my iPhone with the last 100 added, or top rated songs. ARGH!
Alas, after following a suggestion from this discussion thread (Thanks Dave Jelfs!) we now have a solution. In fact there’s even a bonus side effect for those who only want to sync music, and not video within your playlists.
Update: Joel S points out that this is not totally accurate. “In my own testing, these playlists will still include Music Videos.”
First find your Smart Playlist in the sidebar.
Ctrl + Click on the playlist and select “Edit Smart Playlist”
A new window will appear with all the settings for that particular playlist. Add a new rule of ‘Playlist is Music’
Click to view
You’ll notice ‘Live updating’ is still on.
Now sync your playlist with your phone. TaDa!
While is is a workaround it does allow for the playlist to be synced, auto updated and appear sorted as you wish on the iPhone.
Like my previous troubleshooting articles I hope this post will be quickly updated when Apple roles out a fix. Until then, happy Smart Playlist syncing!
As with everything YMMV. I was using the following setup.
Macbook Pro 1.83 Ghz
Snow Leopard 10.6.1
iTunes 9.0.1
iPhone OS 3.1
If you have an improvement please leave a comment.
