Hack Turns iPod into PDA

Liquidape writes "Provue Development has released a personal info and contact manager app called iPod Organizer. The program enables use of iPod for storing and retrieving phone numbers, email addresses, flight numbers, appointment times and other data. It also comes with a sync feature. " Obviously it is fairly limited just because of the input for this device, but its quite a clever hack.

Comments

"hack" indeed

[commonchaos]

I might have read the article wrong, but this looks like all it does is use the iPods built-in menu system and just makes a bunch of mp3's based on what you input into your "PIM", kind of like "$ touch meeting-at-12:00-mc_donalds.mp3" ...

It works great

[pinkpineapple]

That is what people were expecting when Apple announced that it would introduce a device that would revolutionize the world. And that is what people have done without waiting for Apple to keep us waiting for the next big thing. So I've been tired of waiting for Apple to respond to the need of their customers and I just got this. And I just love using it. It's funny that the developer web site shows only Mac OS 9 screenshots though... Stupid Steve! Go Steve! ;-)

PPA, the girl next door

MP3's w/ DTMF tones?

[su-geek]

I guess you could write a small program to enter the telephone numbers and names save as an mp3 with ID3 tags as contact name and a small MP3 file with the DTMF tones to dial the contact. To bad redboxes don't work any more or the ipod would make a nice phreaking tool.

Re:Somebody has done this before

[dhovis]

Actually it is a little more complicated than that.

What the iPod displays when you select a song is the ID3 tags that are stored in the MP3 files. Then this program just creates a bunch of MP3 files with silent sound tracks (and low bitrates) with your contact information stored in the Artist/Album/Title ID3 tags.

I've notice some people complaining that you can't add contacts on the go, so this is worthless. I think that misses the point here. The iPod is an MP3 player. Apple has never claimed that it can do anything else. But if you carry it around with you all the time, this is a nice little hack to add a little extra functionallity. Nobody is claiming that this makes the iPod a full featured PDA.