I don’t like the word process

The fun part working for a carrier is that you sometimes get to touch the new stuff before it is introduced to the market.

At the moment I’m carrying a Samsung Galaxy Nexus as my primary device. It’s a cool gadget, maybe on par with the iPhone. But that’s not what I want to talk about today.

The Samsung phone showed me with brutal honesty how settled I am in the iOS ecosystem. The established processes makes it harder to switch sides.

Let me give you one example.

I listen to a lot of music on the go & everywhere. So I’m eager to get the relevant music from my large music library to my little companion (iPhone 4S). On the one hand I want my favorite songs, on the other hand I want to discover new music to my liking.

That’s where the old fellow iTunes comes in. Since Version 3 you can create Smart Playlists (they update automatically based on selected criterias).

For my purpose, I build two lists which accompany each other:

The playlist “Fresh” displays all songs that have been added to my iTunes in the last 3 weeks, that I haven’t listened to.

The second one, named “Hot Right Now”, lists the songs that I’m currently listening to a lot, means they’re my favs right now.

The only thing left for the setup is to select the playlists to sync with my phone:

I also include the Genius Mix “Indie Rock” made by iTunes and tick the box “Automatically fill free space with songs”. From my experience the last option gives you the songs that have the highest playcount in the library.

Of course one can tweak the parameters to their satisfaction, but I accomplished my goal: Everytime I sync with iTunes I get the music I like best, mixed with a bunch of new stuff I haven’t heard before, always maxing out the storage capacity, automatically.

Now show me the Android way of doing this task. (There is none.)

And that from the guy who told you 15 months ago how to stay iTunes free. Oh, irony.

[Update]

I recently re-discovered the iTunes alternative doubleTwist. It should be noted that doubleTwist offers the import of existing iTunes playlists (inlcuding Smart ones) and can sync with Android devices.

Quick tip for all Google Chrome users: Try the feedly extension. Firstly, feedly is a sleek GUI for a web worker’s beloved tool, Google Reader. I use it to see what I missed. To be clear: I have a tag in Google Reader, called ‘fav’. Every feed item in here gets read at least on a daily basis. When that folder got emptied, I go to my home screen on feedly. The screen aggregates and prioritizes all the other articles based on the overall importance AND my personal habits. Think of it like a Techmeme that you can tweak to fit your interests. Back to the excellent extension. feedly offers ‘mini’, a button that sits in the down right corner of every webpage. As you can see you can immediately share content through the channels you select and other get other options (“following” is feedly language for subscribing to the RSS feed in Google Reader). That way the extension replaced RSS-Abonnement, Shareaholic, Postponer Adder. Remember that you can assign the “save for later”-button to any service through ifttt. BTW: The browser is nowadays the central application on your computer. Therefore the work environment deserves a lot of attention and continuous refining. I uploaded a complete list of my Chrome extensions here.
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Quick tip for all Google Chrome users: Try the feedly extension.

Firstly, feedly is a sleek GUI for a web worker’s beloved tool, Google Reader. I use it to see what I missed. To be clear: I have a tag in Google Reader, called ‘fav’. Every feed item in here gets read at least on a daily basis. When that folder got emptied, I go to my home screen on feedly. The screen aggregates and prioritizes all the other articles based on the overall importance AND my personal habits. Think of it like a Techmeme that you can tweak to fit your interests.

Back to the excellent extension. feedly offers ‘mini’, a button that sits in the down right corner of every webpage. As you can see you can immediately share content through the channels you select and other get other options (“following” is feedly language for subscribing to the RSS feed in Google Reader). That way the extension replaced RSS-Abonnement, Shareaholic, Postponer Adder. Remember that you can assign the “save for later”-button to any service through ifttt.

BTW: The browser is nowadays the central application on your computer. Therefore the work environment deserves a lot of attention and continuous refining. I uploaded a complete list of my Chrome extensions here.