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Putting photos on your iPod is a pleasant-enough experience, and being able to show off your family snaps to your work colleagues has an appeal that’s sure to last for a while, but there’s also a small minority of the general public who will always see how far they can push something; how they can break out of the traditional uses for a medium, and in the process, create something new and interesting.
Look down the list of sites we’ve found for you and they’ve all got something in common – they’ve all taken the basic photo-viewing feature of the iPod and tweaked, manipulated and altered it for the own ends. And we think that they all deserve a certain amount of credit for offering something that’s completely original...
iPOD SCRUBS
Remember those old-fashioned flick books? They worked by displaying a series of images that changed very slightly from the last one. Then, when you flicked through them quickly, it made it look like the drawing was animated. Well that’s the basic premise behind iPod scrubs(image 1), as each of the 60-plus galleries is made up of a series of images that you download and then scroll through with the Click wheel.
CLICKWHEEL
An online database of comics (image 2), you can download any of them for free and add them to your iPod’s photo library. If you’ve created a cartoon of your own, then you can submit and potentially earn revenue from it if it becomes one of Clickwheel’s most popular downloads.
iSUBWAYMAPS
The creator of this site works on the basis that there aren’t that many iPod owners who would ever want a subway map of London, Paris or Tokyo on their iPod to carry around with them, but for the small minority that do, this is pure genius. There are now 20 maps on the site, and each one is made up of a series of images that fit together like a jigsaw puzzle to create a complete picture of the subway you need to find your way around. We recommend that you download all of them, because you never know when you’ll be lost in London or misplaced in Milan.
GOOGLE MAPS
If you’re planning a route and you don’t have a sat nav in your car, then why not go to Google Maps, plan out the route between the two locations and then do screen dumps for each stage of the route. Then all you need to do is crop them to size, import them onto your iPod and follow the maps.
Another fun thing you can do is to find your house, zoom right out and then zoom in slowly, taking screen dumps for each stage. Then, when you put them onto your iPod, you can use the Click wheel to zoom from an image of the whole planet right down to your house. It’s hardly groundbreaking stuff, but it’s fun nonetheless.
iPOD STEREOSCOPE
This is one for the iPod owner who has everything, as we can promise you that owning one of these guarantees you entry to a very exclusive club. A stereoscope is (very) basically a device you look through that has a pair of iPods at the other end (image 3), each one showing the same image – giving the illusion of a three-dimensional image. If you’re lucky enough to own two iPod capable of displaying photos and it’s raining outside and there’s nothing on television, this might be a good way to waste a wet afternoon. Top marks for originality and inventiveness, though.
As ever, this is just a starting point. A deeper search on the Internet may reveal other people doing original things with iPods and photos, or you might even decide to do something yourself – like a basic flicker book-style animation for your iPod Photo or nano. If you do though, make sure that you tell us about it. It might make a good story for Pod Almighty, or if you’ve made your own website about it then we promise to include it in the Directory.
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