I’m chillin’ here in bed tonight, goin’ over some news on the Neocell before I fall asleep. I go to load up a news story, and once I load the page up, I notice I can’t navigate the page because something’s floating above the page blocking me. What is it? It’s a form of web pop-up made just for iPhones.

As you can see in the images below, it’s not an actual third party advertisement. It’s actually an ad to try and put a bull **** icon onto my precious home screen for the crappy eweek.com web site. (eweek.com is one of the worst new sites.) You can see from the pics that the “pop-up” positions itself perfectly in both orientations.

I could easily hit the little “x” button to close it out and continue reading the article in peace, but **** that. I instead took screen shots of it (for the purpose of this post) and then closed it out.

Why? Because I do not respond well to web sites that use allowing pop-ups, and I also don’t respond well to web sites that pull bull **** like this. If *I* want to chose to bookmark a web site, *I’ll* do it. I don’t need a web site suggesting it to me. And certainly not putting a crappy web icon on my precious home screen.

As web sites become more and more interactive, polished and catering to iPhones, you’ll also have some web sites that go in the opposite direction, such as eweek.com.

Peace, JbB

Well I’m having problems with my account billing with AT&T. I’m tryin’ like mad to see what I can do about the situation. When I find out what the outcome is, I’ll post about it in detail.

Peace, JbB

I found out something pretty tight today. I found out that you use the Voice Memos app to record audio in the background. That’s pretty ‘freakin’ tight. Here’s why.

Say that your sitting somewhere, talking about something important with someone, such as getting a refund on something or recording the audio of someone who had just caused you to have a car accident, it’s a smart idea to record the audio. But if your like me, you gotta’ use your iPhone for all sorts’a crap, such as jotting down notes or using the calculator or checking a web page. The great thing is that you can still record audio while doin’ different things.

Now my girl tells me this isn’t new, that she’s been doin’ it on her iPhone 3G even before OS 4. But it’s new to me.

So my advice, if your ever in a situation where recording someone’s audio is important, such as someone giving you a “spoken promise”, record that sucker’s audio.

Peace, JbB

I’m here at a little pub in downtown Bradenton, sipping’ on a cherry coke.

Man was I pleasantly surprised to see that my Minimove iPhone boombox controls and remote controller are able to control Pandora, the same way it controlled the iPod app, now that iOS 4.0 is out.

What good thinking on Apple’s part, ya know? There are certain “API’s” that control what third party apps can control, and what third party hardware can control. Rather than make controlling third party audio apps a separate API, where old hardware controllers couldn’t control them, they simply make the operating system decide to control the new “iPod out” audio controls.

You know no other company would do it like this. They’d make any old hardware not work with the new software. Their excuse? “The old hardware only works with this old system, and only new hardware can work with the new system.” They would tell people “This hardware worked fine from 2007 to 2009, but it’s 2010 now and only products made in 2010 or later will work.”. People, consumers and tech journalists, wouldn’t question it much ‘cuz they wouldn’t realize that it doesn’t have to be that way. “The new [company name] product is great, though it doesn’t work with [hardware product] anymore. But that’s just what happens when new technology comes out.”

That is, if any other company even did any hardware controllers. Funny thing is, other smartphone makers don’t even have a hardware control system at all. (Yeah, I’m lookin’ at you Android.) None of them. And they don’t have any plans to make one. And if they do, it’ll probably be company A that does, it’ll be proprietary, patient protected, so that no other company can use it. Well then company B wants to be competitive and makes their own, as well as company C. Hardware manufacturers aren’t gonna’ support one vender over another, and they all have very small market share.

And if a group, say the Headset Open Alliance (which is basically Google’s pet project), creates a hardware controller open standard for Google Android devices, it won’t be regulated. After all, it’s an open standard. They don’t have to regulate the way their operating system or phone hardware works with it. And Google doesn’t regulate ANY apps on their app market, so of course there wouldn’t be any regulation of the way the app interfaces with the hardware. So the result wouldn’t be rock solid and reliable. It would be buggy or just plain broken. Certain phones would only work with certain hardware devices, certain OS versions wouldn’t work with certain apps, etc. I believe that’s why they haven’t done one and don’t have any plans on it. That, and I’m sure hardware venders won’t support it. Apple’s “iProducts” are the only thing out there that have functionality like this, baby.

Now I start to think about all the cars that have built-in controls for iPods and how awesome that is to just plug in your iPhone and start controlling Pandora or whatever. Of course you can only control the play / pause and next functions for Pandora, you can’t thumbs down to change stations from the controllers, but that’s why you got your iPhone there.

This is a real exciting time for iPhone and iPod touch owners. It’s like our hardware devices all got an upgrade.

Peace, JbB