My 5th generation iPod and it’s predecessor the Creative Zen Xtra both have/had a great feature that I used practically every day. This feature, Album Shuffle, was ideal for someone like myself who prefers to listen to a whole album as it was released rather than just a random song. I also have a number of live recordings that need to be played in order. Apple, in their infinite wisdom, decided to disable the shuffle by album feature in both the iPhone and iPod Touch. Did you notice how I say ‘disable’ and not ‘remove’? The feature is present in the .plist file for Settings.app but this is only available to jailbroken phones and those with access to Xcode – which dramatically reduces the number of people it is available to. It also requires connecting to a Mac every time you want to change your shuffle mode from ‘by album’ to ‘by track’ so is no good when you’re on the road.

So, what are the other options? Well, as Apple rightly advertise: ‘There’s an App for That’ although in this case there are 3 that do the job and are currently available in the UK AppStore. In alphabetical order we have: ‘Album Mixer – Shuffle by Album‘, ‘iAlbum Player‘ and ‘Quick Music‘.

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Is this evidence of Apple’s controversial Killswitch in action?

Please note this now appears to be a bug which is being fixed.

A recent app that I, like many others, bought on the AppStore with real money appears to have suddenly stopped working. A simple application called Night Stand, which is now copied by other app developers in true AppStore style, designed to simply display the time and alarm while dimming the screen. Not exactly a controversial app to say the least and has been available for some time! Now it seems that you can load the app but it simply won’t run.

This app has also been tested on a colleagues phone with the same results. This is not as a result of any updates as it was seen to work recently and, stranger still, the app has been pulled from the AppStore itself. As of this moment I have not yet been able to find any reason for it’s disappearance, but am more concerned about the fact that any app can seemingly be pulled from your device without warning or reason.

I paid good money for that app, all be it 59 pence but it is mine, or is it?