iOS 5 “wow” moment
Apple just totally made my day. Allow me to provide some background on my music-listening habits first.
As some of you may know, I employ a very well-defined initiation ritual for new music. I add albums on Sunday, listen to each one all the way through on Monday, listen to the entire list of new music (shuffled) on Tuesday and Wednesday, and then rate each song on Thursday.
Songs that make the cut (with 4 or 5 stars) then start appearing in my smart playlist rotation. Those with 3 and fewer languish in iTunes, waiting for the moment in the vague and distant future when I listen again and hear something I like, and reconsider. For many, that day never comes. Ahem. </background>
I accidentally forced a hard reset of my phone (I was trying to hard-reset just the current app). I stared in horror at the blank screen, realizing I had only listened to slightly more than half of the songs on my 71-song playlist. I expected the Music (née iPod) app to come back as if I were launching it for the first time.
Classically, the Music app has had problems remembering where you were in a shuffled playlist if anything out of the ordinary occurred (the app crashing, the phone restarting, a newborn baby crying, etc.). These issues have disappeared slowly, one at a time, with each major and minor OS release. Surely, though, a hard reset would cause it to hopelessly lose my place.
When my iPhone awoke, my home screen icons greeting me, I apprehensively tapped on the Music app…
It remembered! It was still shuffled, the last track I listened to was in progress, it was the right number (37 of 71), and as more songs played, it was evident that it had completely persisted the shuffled order of the playlist. My ass had truly been saved.
One down note, barely even worth mentioning: it didn’t remember my position within the track. As it restored, though, it showed a screenshot from before the crash, so I was easily able to scrub back to that point.
