iPod and iTunes: The Missing Manual, Third Edition

Notes

The squint factor may be a little high, but the iPod can also lend its screen for displaying text files, which can come in handy if you want to review class notes while relaxing to a little Queen Latifah or skim your talking points before a presentation.

If you have an iPod 2003-or-later model, all of this comes to you courtesy of a text-reader program called Notes (Figure 10-5). Notes can hold about 1,000 plain text files and display one at a time onscreen.

Figure 10-5. If you can save it as a plain text file, you can read it on your iPod with the recently added Notes feature. If you don’t have a 2003- model iPod, see page 227 for several shareware programs that do the same thing.

You create iPod Notes from plain text files—those with a .txt extension. You can’t use full-fledged word processing documents from Microsoft Word or Apple-Works, unless you save them as plain text files. (As Chapter 12 makes clear, you can certainly use the iPod as a portable drive to ferry big files from one computer to another, but you can only display text files in Notes). Most word processing programs, however, can export a file’s contents into Text Only or Plain Text.

For example, if you have a Word or AppleWorks document that you want to read on the iPod, open it and choose File → Save As (or the equivalent command in whatever program you’re using). Select plain text formatting for the newly saved ...