Experiments with iPod Notes:

I've had opportunity over the last year to repurpose online content for use on iPod devices via the Notes feature. After much fussing and forcing it became apparent that the nuances of this device needed some journaling. So, below are a couple of notes on Notes. Enjoy!

Experiments with iPod Notes - Entity References:

Entity references are something I use hour after hour during the working day. So, I figured it couldn't hurt to carry a short list of the more common ones around in my iPod mini. While this seemed like a simple enough thing to accomplish I was surprised to find out that iPod Notes was not as entity-friendly as I would have imagined.

To start with, the iPod tries to out think you a bit. A standard technique for displaying an entity reference in literal text is to encode the leading ampersand (eg: "). I gave this a shot and to my surprise I found that the iPod rendered it as a properly encoded character (eg: "). The solution was pretty straightforward however. Simply breaking the reference up with tab characters was enough to accomplish the task (eg: &[tab]quot[tab];).

The next set of problems I encountered were a little more depressing. After implementing text files containing entity references in hex, decimal, and by name, it looked like there were several characters not supported by the iPod. At first I thought this might be a problem with the character set I had chosen (ISO-8859-1) as that set has some known omissions such as the capital Y dieresis/umlaut (Ÿ). Switching to UTF-8 did not solve the problem however. Blessed/cursed with OCD I proceeded to take an inventory of the situation.

The upshot is that more than a few characters are unavailable or malformed using entity references, regardless of the chosen character set. Luckily, simply hucking the raw characters into iPod notes allows most of them to be rendered properly, so at least there's a work around for the majority of the missing characters. One permanent casualty seems to be the trademark symbol (™) which I've yet to be able to implement in any fashion.

Interested parties can grab the text files from the list below:

Experiments with iPod Notes - Links:

The first thing of interest is that links are not active unless the link destination is valid. If the URL is malformed or the destination content unavailable the text will appear, but not as a link.

Extended/special characters can be used in directory names but these same characters render links inactive when used as the values of href attributes. This is true to form but nonetheless of interest to note. The solution is rather simple: good old-fashioned URL encoding.

Out of curiousity I also experimented with using entity references in links and/or directory names. FYI: This does not work around the issue. When used in directory names the entities are rendered literally. Character encoding does not seem to have any effect.

Experiments with iPod Notes - More to come:

OK, the above isn't really exhaustive. But it's likely I'll add more to this page in time. Until then, please feel free to send me any helpful observations or experiment results if you've got them. You can grab my e-mail address from the esoterraka.com WTF page.