Bible Bloom’s Daily Bible Challenge

Bible Bloom homescreen
We are very late in getting this up, but given the site issues and just how popular our review of Bible Bloom has been, its about time that we make a note about something new happening with Bible Bloom called the Daily Bible Challenge.

Now, you’ve been a part of reading plans before, but this one offers a bit more. And combined with the pleasant UI of BIble Bloom’s app, could make for a neat reason to use this Bible app versus to others.

Here’s more about the Bible Challenge:

The Big Idea
The Bible Bloom Daily Challenge is a journey that will stretch and strengthen your faith in Jesus Christ. The concept is very simple but the impact is profound: each day we’ll issue a new challenge to experience Jesus. You can try it, skip it, or share it. Some challenges will be easy and others will stretch you. But every challenge will grow your faith, glorify Jesus, and advance the kingdom of heaven.

What is even more exciting is that Christians all over the world will take the same challenge at the same time. Now imagine the revelation of Jesus that will enter your life through a daily challenge multiplied by tens of thousands of Christians all over the world. Together we will ask for a greater revelation of Jesus, pray against injustices like human trafficking and abortion, bless Israel, and activate our faith through evangelism. There are 365 inspiring, thought provoking, and fun challenges to stretch your faith.

Read more about the Bible Bloom Daily Bible Challenge

Sounds like something worth taking part in? Good stuff. Let’s sweeten the deal for you here.

Bible Bloom has given us two promo-codes that we’ll give away to anyone who wants to try out the Bible Bloom app. Its only available on Apple’s iOS devices (made for the iPhone, but will work on the iPad) so sorry about that end of things. But for those of you looking to try something a bit different, or get a friend or family member to try something different, this is a great idea. If you are interested in the promo code, shoot us a message via Twitter including BibleBloom in a hashtag (for example, “hey @mobileminmag, I’d like to try that #BibleBloom app”). If we get a large number of tweets, we’ll choose at random; if not, we’ll just go by the responses. Let’s say that we give about 3 days to get a response from you all on that.

Until that point, stay tuned to MMM for more bible app reviews, commentary, or other potential giveaways.

How Do You Use Study Resources

screenshot of Olive Tree Bible Study App when using concordance resources
The other day while going through email, I noticed a newsletter from the good folks over at Olive Tree Bible Software. As I read, I saw a neat piece in there about how to use a concordance with their software. Here’s a snippet:

…As you can see, the Olive Tree Concordances are much more than a list of cross references for each word in the Bible. With dictionary information tied to the original language, these resources are valuable tools for Bible study. Each concordance comes with a copy of the Bible in the selected translation…

Read the rest of Using A Concordance in the Bible Study App at the Olive Tree Blog

That piece got me thinking back to how I used to use print resources, then print and web, and then later web and mobile resources in order to do my studies. A good deal of the work that went into feature suggestions and the design of Palm Bible+ app which accelerated my travels in this space. It was very important then to not just have access to the resource, but have it in such a way that it didn’t interrupt the reading flow, but was there when needed. Now then, we did things with the PalmOS Graffiti system, and even the keyboard on Treo devices to make that happen. These days with touch and more consistent connectivity, designing these resources into an app is a bigger challenge.

Even with that challenge, its still a suitable flow of use. So, let’s open question that titles this post (how do you use study resources) with a few qualifiers:

  • For those of you who might use commentaries, concordances, etc. in your private reading, how do you do it? What could be done better?
  • For those of you who use those resources while teaching, what kinds of challenges do you run into either from the side of teaching or the side of sharing the sources of that info with students?
  • For those wh might use these resources to teach, but don’t share them with your students/audiences, why?

There you have a few ways to frame an answer. Let’s hear what you have to say towards using study resources, especially with your mobile-enabled audiences.

How Would Jesus Use (Compter/Connected) Technology

Was browsing over at Symbiota and came across a really interesting question worth discussion on several levels: How would Jesus use technology?

…I think Jesus would have used the technology in a couple of ways. One, I think because we see Jesus working primarily with his group of 12. He talk crowds, he healed and he walked through cities and really impacted a lot of people. But he concentrated, he put a lot of his leadership training in his 12. So I think Jesus would have really used technology to train his core leaders to give them the tools. I think of the story when Jesus send 70, 2 by 2. I can imagine, you know, hypothetically if I can use my imagination them being in the field and asking Jesus the question and having Jesus on Skype or on Google Hangout and he’s saying, OK this is how I would do the situation if I were you.

So I think he would primarily use it in training his core leaders but also because he was impacting so many people, he would make sure that the gospel was broadcasted as far and as wide as possible…

Read the rest of the Interview with Pierre Quinn over at Symbiota

Personally, I don’t know that Jesus would have used tech in that manner. At least not when it came time for ministry. If we look at the text, we see very little of the carpenter in the text, but we do see the effects of his work in terms of social movements, behaviors, and responses.

Its an interesting one, and makes us really think about how we navigate and move in this space. Perhaps its less about the tech, and more about the process after the tech we should pay attention to?

Disclaimer: Symbiota is one of several partner groups to MMM. Interested in partnering with MMM?

Securing the Doors Around Here

Update: the HTTPS piece talked about here has been turned off for the moment as it was the reason for the downtime today. It will come back. So please take note of the below as a bit of a preemptive note.

As if there isn’t enough news going around these days about data, access, and security, one of the more recent pieces that has sounded an alarm is the news of a botnet (automated scripts that act like tiny computers within programs) that is aiming to use WordPress-powered blogs for generally making a bit of nasty noise around the web. Since MMM is among many faith/tech sites that uses WordPress, we’ve been going about adding some measures of security to the site here – and its noticable that it will have an effect on how you consume information around here.

If you are coming here direcly by typing in the URL (as about 45% of our visitors do), you will have noticed a note about the security certificate for the page, and then you would have noticed that we are now running the site with SSL enabled. You notice this specifically by the https:// that is in the URL field of this page. That’s the biggest piece of friction and has actually resulted in about 2/3 of the traffic that we normally see in that organic fashion going away. Crazy drop I know, but if it means that the information here remains usable in a secure manner, that’s going to have to be the case.

Enabling SSL, along with a few other features behind the scenes, happened to be enabled by the use of the WordPress plugin Better WP Security. Better WP Security enables all kinds of neat features that you would normally need to know a bit about network security to implement, while also adding some semblance of sanity through log reviews, IP blocking, and site database backups. Being that MMM is no stranger to strange visitors, this is a very important measure of security that we needed to implement, and frankly probably comes at a great time. Our server admin also considers it a good thing to add, even though its not necessarily the route they would have gone with (they are admins, they know things too).

The SSL tweak has broken pages for a number of visitors. The biggest break is actually on the side of our RSS feeds. You will need to check your feed address – its needs the https:// then mobileministrymagazine.com/feed in order to work properly. Yes, I’m still using Feedburner (feeds.feedburner.com/mobileminmag – I think that’s it), but if that service was also to be cut off by Google, you need to know how to get our content in the most direct way as possible.

For those of you not coming to MMM through any of our apps/experiments, you can still get to MMM content through our HTML5/jQuery web app, or by the (only?) mobile ministry portal out there – MobMin.Info. Either one puts our content in front of you in a mobile-friendly, quick, and contextually-relevant manner. Who knows… we might just let those stay as the entry points while the rest of the web works itself out.

Other than that, content will still flow to and through our Twitter feed (@mobileminmag). And there will also be a slew of content posted by others at Twitter, Pinterest, and other social media outlets if you search for #mobmin. There’s a growing body of conversations and works happening, and MMM is proud to be a part of that conversation.

I’m sure that our folks who work in the mobile security space will have more to add to this thread, and that conversation remains open here and other places. If anyone has continued advice for MMM, please don’t hesitate to drop us a line.

For some other tips on how to secure your WordPress blogs, visit this recent article at Internet Evangelism Day – with IE Day coming up in a few days (April 21st) this makes even more sense to be on top of for your ministry communications.

Psst… Pass It On

Its been a bit of a slow news week, but there are always notes being passed this worth passing along to you.

  • WorldBibles is a website that has a collection of text and audio Bibles in a few thousand languages. Much of the content is sourced from other websites, but its all collected in one place with a decent search facility
  • In an article over at Fast Company, its talked about why good intentions aren’t enough to make people use your app. That’s a lesson that many in the faith space don’t want to hear (that there’s not as much demand for this content as we want folks to believe). The solution is in part better marketing, but another part building stuff that matters before building the rationale for traditional messaging
  • Also at Fast Company, a article looks at problem solving electronic toys for kids and how one solution points at ways that existing software and hardware can be better purposed for engaging brains and activities… not just entertainment or passive learning as is usually the case
  • Continuing down the kids meme, the Huffington Post looks at tech in schools when kids are able to bring their own device and how that fosters different expectations and results in terms of the tech and lessons from those kids. Lessons here for missions work as well as understanding the educational advantages and constraints of mobile (in ministry).

There are a good deal more articles out there. Much of the week’s notes have already been passed along via Twitter (use the hastag #mobmin to see these). What news and notes have you found worth sharing?

[Video] April Mobile Minsitry Notes

As we’ve done the past months, here’s a video(cast) about those things related to mobile ministry. We talk a bit about the Mobile Ministry Forum, as well as some newly acquired tech and how that’s being used here at MMM. Take a peek and let us know what you think of these videos.

Watch previous months videocasts:

Also, you can check out other videos about mobile ministry.

Mobile and Disruptive Events

As the USA has witnesses in light of the Boston Marathon bombing, there are some signifiant failings towards mobile that tend to rear their heads. And certainly there are things that can (and won’t) be done to address that. Fast Company went through a litnay of possible ways that carriers have addressed the issue of call/data/messaging volume during emergencies in a recent article:

…Mobile networks have bandwidth that is more than sufficient 99% of the time. However, when disaster strikes, the decentralized nature of the network means that whole geographic regions can be knocked out by increased call volume. Whenever the generous-but-finite bandwidth at carrier site buildings are strained, users are prevented from making voice calls. Because SMS text messages take up far less bandwidth, mobile carriers instead encourage users to text message each other. As Pica put it to Fast Company, “text requires less dedicated real-time capacity than voice. Data networks including LTE and EVDO were not impacted due to the nature of the way data systems are used.”…

Read the rest of Why Your Phone Doesn’t Work During Disasters and How to Fix It at Fast Company

As much as I liked the idea of the article, and have thought about similar here in light of the recent bombings in Boston and Bagdad, I don’t necessarily think of the nature of the network in the same way. In emergency situations, I think of communications channelling going from utility-controlled to P2P-types of methods. We talked about the quick-setup and versatile voice/data network put up at the Burning Man festival each year. And have also talked about the mesh-networking-based product Serval – which acts a lot like the way Skype used to work (several nodes connecting to each other rather than all pointing to a single node).

In many of the conversations about mobile ministry in the missions and security spaces, this idea of P2P communications gets a slightly larger share of attention (from IT folks) than it does in the general conversation. Manily because our normal behaviors have been shaped to expect utilities to be managed from a regional or govermental central point. And indeed, the governance and poolicies set on those levels creates a quality of service level that just isn’t matched by other methods. However, when there aree emergencies, this central-focus becomes a failure point to which its literally a tech and behavior shift to do something different.

In some respects, I’m proposing that we start doing things like sharing communications over Bluetooth (passing notes, contact cards, events, etc.) in normal situations so that when emergencies do come up such as Boston/Bagdad that we are more or less equipped to keep going, rather than feel like the tech limits us to wait until a gatekeeper says its ok to connect in a specific way.

How Do You Keep Up with Mobile Ministry

Mobile Minsitry Magazine al version loaded on Kindle Fire HD, via Twitter

Of the major news items to hit the internet in the past weeks, the shutting down of Google Reader seems to have hit many journalists, bloggers, and information gatherers pretty hard. Google Reader is a website by which you can collect website subscriptions and view them all in one place. Google Reader is based on a technology called RSS (developed by Dave Winer) that’s pretty much a core feature for many kinds of applications around the web (Facebook newsfeeds, Flipboard, etc. all use RSS or its technologies in whole or part).

With Google Reader shutting down though, its going to become a bit harder for some folks to keep up with those things happening in spaces they pay attention to. I’ve thought about this as it relates to mobile minsitry – which would be described by many as the long-tail of faith-based conversations, mobile, or technology new. Long-tail means that it happens at the edge, and there’s not a great maiinstream media component to it. Those whom are involved in keeping the subject handy are few, and therefore the audience is usually made up of people who go out to find the source, more than news driving them there.

Google Reader has been a key component towards following up on many news bits that make it here. But, I’ve started to take steps to ween myself from there as I look for a better solution that fits my multi-device lifestyle. Part of my solution has been to invent my own RSS reader. That’s something that’s going along well, but I clearly don’t have the coding chops to make Google Reader, so I’m working along the features that I want, and the features that I can build. Doing so had me thinking about the audience here, and what you all might do.

We have this property called MobMin.Info which is a portal page towards those things about mobile minsitry – and it could be updated to point to RSS feeds of the sites featured there, in addition to being more dynamic towards showing the latest articles from those featured sites. Having coded something similar to this on my personal site, I see where it could work, and where it could probably cause a problem for some folks.

And for MMM, we’ve got this HTML5-based, dynamic landing page that does similar. The only real issue there is that it only points to content here, and only to a snippet of the latest posts. It does hav e a working search feature though. That could be something.

Still, that’s solutions made for one person, not a movement. So, the question stands: “how do you keep up with mobile ministry topics?” And what could be done better if you have stopped doing so?

Perhaps there’s an answer out there that doesn’t look like anything proposed,, but gives us all something to look forward to as information and connectivity become even more embedded into how this space evolves.

FaithVilliage’s 10 Recommended Apps

mobile device in cradle, via FaithVilliage

While its rare that we do these lists, its something that comes up from time to time from our partners. The latest of these recomended apps listings comes from FaithVilliage, with many apps on here that we’ve not seen highlighted as often before (which is good). Here’s a snippet:

4. Postagram: iPhone / Android

There’s nothing spiritual about the free Postagram app, per se, but we love to send encouraging postcards to our friends through it. The way it works: You choose a picture from your camera roll, upload it to Postagram, add a message, and Postagram will create the postcard and mail it to the recipient for 99 cents. They’re just a fun way to tell someone you’re thinking about them, praying for them or for sending them a verse of encouragement.

5. OverDrive: iPhone / Android

This free app allows you to download books from your public, school, or college library. The cool part, though, is not that it’s an eReader, but it’s also an audio book reader. So if you’re on a road trip or commuting to work, you can find your library (over 18,000 libraries use OverDrive), check out a title (you need a valid library card first), and listen to it while you drive. While school libraries might not have Christian literature, public libraries often do. What’s even better: You don’t have to worry about returning the title. It expires at the end of the lending period.

Readof the rest of 10 Highly Recommended Mobile Apps for Christians at FaithVilliage

Disclaimer: MMM’s content is syndicated at FaithVilliage. They are a content partner.

Adaptive Interfaces

All Books on Nokia N8 screenshot

Many of the user interfaces that I come across on the various mobile devices that I interact with are not all that neat. Let me correct that. They were novel and neat when I first acquired the device or application. But, that quikcly got old and stale – especially in those applications that I interacted with the most. What would be neat in many of those cases is the interface adapting to my increased usage and then changing to either expose more of itself, or trimming to only exposing the features that I use the most.

I’ve taken to calling it adaptive intelligence or an adaptive interface. Basically that as I spend time in the application or program, that it adapts to my greater comfort with some features, and recommends or trims what I see based on what is learned about my usage. This was some of what when into my UI design for All Books – as you went into a book/chapter, the book name/chapter number would “age,” dimming itself compared to what you haven’t read as much. In time, you could see what areas of the Bible it was that you didn’t read much easier than you could get to the parts you did read more often.

I’m not the only one thinking along these lines, but I do think that its something that we can do a good bit more of in this space of faith-based content. It seems like a new UI idea, and even has been proposed as much in an article at FastCo Design:

…In 1975, the Hungarian psychology professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi outlined his theory of “flow” in his seminal work, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. He defined the concept as ‘‘the holistic experience that people feel when they act with total involvement.’’ When in the flow state, people become absorbed in their activity, narrowing their awareness to the activity itself, losing self-consciousness, and feeling in control of their environment. Flow is also proven to have a positive impact on learning. In skiing, novice practitioners are advised to spend the first few days at the green beginner slopes to get the best learning experience. On the other hand, experienced skiers will find themselves bored at the beginner slopes and must seek their optimal experience on the black expert slopes. This individual balance between skill and challenge is, according to Csikszentmihalyi, called the “flow zone” and staying in this flow zone is the best possible way to learn and make progress while still feeling constantly challenged and intrinsically motivated.

While flow has been extensively applied in studying a broad range of contexts, such as sports, shopping, rock climbing, dancing and others, I believe that, by drawing inspiration from video games, flow can be used to improve the user experience in interactive electronic consumer products…

It takes a lot of foresight to make an interface like this. Similar to the classic “choose your own adventure” books, the application author has to be content with designing many paths to a solution, and doing so in a way that doesn’t break up the story. What would a bible look like if it adapted to our reading tendencies? Or better, what about a Bible app that started off doing simple search and reading, then evolved to something like a full-blown study/sermon companion like Logos/Olive Tree’s products? Would be kind of neat IMO.