Daring Fireball has a good overview of yesterday’s Apple event, in which they updated the nano and touch and introed iTunes 8 (not to mention previewed an iPhone update promised on Friday–hopefully this is the update that will turn me back into “Apple fanboy” instead of “disgruntled Apple fanboy”).
Regarding the new iTunes release, there are a lot of nice touches that make it easier and more enjoyable to manage a large media library. For example, you can now manage settings for podcasts on a per-podcast basis. Why would anyone want to do that, you may ask? Well, I would like to have all of my podcasts but one set to delete a podcast “episode” after I listen to it, with the one exception being NPR All Songs Considered concert podcasts–I’m working my way through converting the better of those into individual MP3s, so I want to hang on to those podcasts even after i listen to them. Prior to iTunes 8, you didn’t have the granularity available to make such an exception. Thanks to this iLounge article on becoming an instant iTunes expert, I learned about the new podcast setting capability, as well as other tweaks.
One downside to iTunes 8 is that it turns on the little iTunes store arrows next to each song, artist and album in your library. Clicking on an arrow takes you to the relevant iTunes store page. Beyond the fact that I don’t buy much media from the iTunes store, I dislike the visual clutter and wasted space with these arrows and so have turned them off via Preferences. Well, you can’t do that anymore–Apple took away the choice. However, an enterprising MacFixIt reader shared a workaround (for Mac OS X at least) that lets you kill them off. Check it out here. I’m back to being arrow-free.