iPod and iTunes: The Missing Manual, Third Edition

Chapter 10. iPod Games and eBooks

The very first iPod model was all music, all the time—unless you knew the secret Easter egg: the classic breakout Brick computer game, hidden from everyone who didn’t know the sequence of button presses that could call it to the screen. Once the secret began to spread across the Internet, Apple’s engineers admitted that the jig was up, and brought the game out into the open—or at least into the Extras menu, under a command called Game.

Starting with the 2003 iPod models, the Extras menu command changed from Game to Games, tripling the ways to kill time on the iPod. The Extras menu also picked up a whole new item: Notes. For the first time, the iPod became not just a music player, calendar, Rolodex, and game machine—it also became an electronic book reader. (Don’t worry if you have an older iPod model that doesn’t have the new text-reading power; add-on shareware brings you the same feature.)

Games

The iPod is a personal entertainment machine on many levels. All models have at least one game: Brick. The iPods in 2003 and beyond come with three others: Music Quiz, Parachute and—perhaps the most popular program ever in the history of the computer—Solitaire. And the iPod Photo, with its color screen, brings a new look to the old classics.

Brick

The Brick game has wandered all over the iPod’s system software. In the first version of the iPod software, you unearthed it by holding down the Select button for five seconds on the About menu (Figure 10-1). In ...