I’m at a Bestwestern, waiting to meet someone. Good time to talk about something I discovered.

Now this is tight. You know how there’s people out there that like to “read books” by listening to them? They buy audio books of whatever book they like and listen to them in the car, while working out, whatever. Most do it through audible.com.

The problem with that is only the best selling books are in audio book format, your not gonna’ find lesser known books there. Audio books are more expensive than regular ebooks because, of course, a lot has to be put into making an audio book. Also, although iPhones store the your current position of an MP3 (which audio books are), if you happen to reboot your phone, it’ll lose you position of the audio book. And worst of all, there’s no way to own both the ebook and the audio book without paying twice for the same book. Screw audio books.

Well, not entirely. There is a way to turn your existing ebooks from the iBooks store into audio books. …For free. Through VoiceOver.

VoiceOver is a way to use your iPhone and have it speak items and words on-screen for you. I use VoiceOver to read web pages when I’m driving on the road, through my Lexus’s speakers. You can set it so that it continues reading through a page automatically. It never worked for audio books though. It could read text on Stanza, but couldn’t automatically read to the next page. And wouldn’t work at all for the Kindle app. But it does work for the iBooks app, and it automatically reads through each page automatically.

These a few advantages of using iBooks as an audio book.

Every page is automatically saved VoiceOver turns to. So if you happen to let your iPhone run out of power, your iBooks location is automatically saved.

You only have to buy the book once. You can then read it as an eBook, or have it read to via VoiceOver.

But you have understand how to use VoiceOver. So go figure it out yourself, but here’s how to do it.

Once you have the book open, triple click your home button to bring up the accessibility menu (make sure you have your triple home button action set to “ask” in the settings).

Tap “Turn VoiceOver On”.

Tap once on the text area of the book.

Tap and drag down with two fingers to start auto-reading.

Now your book will start being read to you via your iPhone’s text-to-speech system.

To stop or pause the reading, tap with two fingers on the screen.

To exit VoiceOver, triple-click the home button.

Tap once on the “Turn VoiceOver Off” button.

Then double tab anywhere on the screen.

It’s also a really good idea to lock the orientation of your iPhone, because if you turn and your iPhone rotates, it’ll cancel the speech reading.

So this method can’t do everything. You can’t have it read to you while in the background or things like that. But that’s fine, ya know?

Now, personally, I’m not sure how much I’ll be using this feature. I personally enjoy reading a book more than listening to it. And I would use it when driving, except for the fact right now the Neocell is being used as my car GPS navigation.

So this is a pretty tight method, right?

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

What a nice day around my apartment complex (see image below), I might as well write about something that’s on my mind. With iOS 4.0, we got folder icons. Right on. But, is it too boring? Does it kinda’ ruin the appeal of swiping through your home screens?

I mean, here’s what happened for me. I had some icons at the very last home screen of the Neocell that I didn’t use. Those icons are the stock Notes, Contacts, Weather and Stocks apps. So the idea of throwing them into their own folder icon named “Unused” was a perfect idea. I love that.

But then I started trying to see what else I could add as folder icons. I found a few apps that could all be put together and that worked out great.

However, the more and more folder icons I created, the more out of place icons looked outside of folder icons. So I started adding more and more to folder icons. Pretty soon, I realized that besides the home screen’s icons, everything should just be placed in folder icons.

But is that really the best solution? I mean, look at the images below. **** looks boring. No longer colorful. No longer fun and unique. Not only that, but while some apps are now easier to find, some are harder to find.

So I wonder, is this really better? I know for people who are app whores and have 20-50 pages of useless and garbage apps that they never use but somehow feel they must have, folder icon organization is a must. But I had like 6 – 8 pages of apps. Swiping through apps was never a problem for me. In fact, it was fun! I never complained. And in swiping through apps, sometimes I’d see an app I had forgotten all about.

But now that’s changed when you organize all apps into folder icons. Before, I’d find apps visually. I’d rarely have to look at the text of an icon to identify it. But now, that’s exactly what I have to do. I have to look at the text of folder icons now to see what’s what.

So I’m not sure if I wanna’ keep everything in folder icons (just because we have it doesn’t mean it’s the best choice) or stop using folder icons and go back to the old way. I know that I’m wishing I wasn’t using folder icons, but I’m gonna’ give it a week or two and see if I end up liking it.

What are your takes on it? Have you been using it for a while and like it or hate it? How many apps do you have, what’s your situation? Gotta’ trick to keep it all flowin’ right? Let me know.

Peace, JbB

Here’s how to close multitasking programs (iPhone 3GS & iPhone 4 only) with iOS 4.0. Double click the home button to open the multitasking bar and tap and hold down on an icon until you see the image below. Then tap the red minus.

Here’s something interesting to note (that I suspect people won’t realize for a while). Each of those apps you see there, such as Skype and all third party apps, until they’re updated for multitasking like Pandora is, aren’t really running in the background. They’re like a 12 app history of what you’ve had open, but aren’t really open in the background. That’s a good thing though. But those apps aren’t running in the background and there’s no need to close them because they aren’t really open.

In fact, there shouldn’t be much need to close backgrounding apps either. Most of them that is.

The reason why is because, once you stop their backgrounding function (such as pausing audio), the background API’s stop working.

So we shouldn’t need to worry about closing programs. Most programs that is. Some programs, such as the GPS navigation app from Navigon, don’t have a real “stop” function. They use the GPS and have no reason to stop. That’s a program we’d want to stop by closing it. Even if doesn’t effect performance, it would drain the battery life.

In fact, most things don’t use the CPU of iPhone 3GS’s to its fullest. But that’s the point. To get the most battery life, iPhones don’t use the CPU to it’s fullest. But with multitasking, things change. You can leave a GPS running and still get great performance, but it’ll eat into your battery life.

So that’s why we wanna’ close /stop apps that do a lot of stuff from running in the background if we’re not using them.

Peace, JbB