The iPod is a marvelously well-designed product. But one of the things about it that really irritates me is the way it handles podcasts. If I’m halfway through listening to one, and I plug the iPod in to download new ones, it will remove the half-listened-to podcast from the iPod. This is so obviously the wrong behavior, and should be so easy to fix, that I find it amazing that no one at Apple has done so. It’s a shame that iTunes isn’t an open source project, because this seems like the sort of thing a competent hacker could find and fix in a weekend if she had access to the source code.
Relatedly, if iTunes finds and downloads a new podcast while an iPod is plugged in, why does it require me to manually push the “sync” button in order to get the podcast onto the iPod. It appears that I could leave the iPod plugged in for hours and it wouldn’t perform the appropriate sync until I either manually tell it to or unplug the iPod and plug it back in. This is another thing that really should be trivial to add.
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