Tag Archives: applications

Upgrading Your Smartphone’s IQ

Chances are, if you are reading MMM, you are well past owning and using your first smartphone. And even if you aren’t there are some things that you’ve noticed about using that smartphone that aren’t all that… smart. For example, having to remember to turn off your phone in church is really something that mobiles should do already. But, because they don’t, we’re here to offer some ways in which you can add some intelligence to your smartphone.

For iPhone folks, if you’ve upgraded to iOS6 then you will want to utilize the Do Not Disturb setting for the time period that you are in service. Its not an automatic setting, but passable. For other iOS versions, you pretty much are on your own for turning it off when you are in meetings and such. Other options that you can take advantage of is that of using Notifications to let you know of updates from apps and services instead of using email for those. That way, you leverage the device’s ability to keep you informed, while not filling up your inbox.

For all you Android-toting folks, you will want to use apps like Tasker, Locale, or Sanity in order to create an auto-setting that would automatically stop all sounds, open your Bible app, open a notes app, etc. when you are in church/community gatherings or bible studies. Once you set this up, you will wonder why this isn’t normal. In the same way, you’ve got that notifications drawer at the top of your screen For recent Motorola Droid folks, you can use SmartActions to do the same thing.

BlackBerry users, there are several profile apps which do the auto-setting as described above. These rely usually on having the event in your calendar, and then the phone will adjust itself based on how you’ve programmed it. What’s really neat about the upcoming BlackBerry 10 platform (BB10) and associated devices, this kind of functionality will not just be there, but many of the social and communication apps/services, they’ll plug into the OS and be seamlessly viewable with a gesture.

For Windows Phone users, there’s not an application that does this (that I’ve seen). So like iPhone folks, your smartphone isn’t so smart in this instance. I’m hopeful that Windows Phone 8 will step up in this regard.

For folks like myself who use Nokia’s Symbian platform, the application Situations or (the old BetaLabs app) Bots I would recommend. Situations is like the Android apps in that you can setup situations in which your device adapts itself. Bots is an app that learns that you set your device to quiet/silent at certain times and will literally make your device start doing that itself – without your attention needed.

A device that adapts, or can be progammed to adjust itself to social contexts. Kind of neat when you put it together. And the best part, you end up not spending unnecessary time on your mobile when other situations warrant your attention.

What kind of things have you done to add some intelligence to your mobile? Or, is it smart enough as is.

Advent and Mobile


Last year, we asked the question “where are the Advent mobile apps?” After a lengthy search, we found some, and even added a section on the Bible Apps page to account for these. With Advent here again, its not only good to reflect on the coming of Christ, but also ask if there has been any new or improved apps or services which further the spirit of this season? If you have a favorite Advent app kr service, or have just done something to reflect the season via your mobile, we’d love to hear it in the comments.

Did You Miss Monday’s Webinar

Great opportunity to talk about the #mobilechurch w/@symbiota... on Twitpic

Mobile Ministry Magazine was a special guest on one of the latest Symbiota webinars. This past Monday, we talked about mobile ministry (#mobmin); specifically, how churches can leverage SMS, mobile web, and mobile apps in order to grow those deeper and wider connections inside and outside of faith communities.

Good this is that if you missed this one, that you can still make another. This webinar will be held again on Dec 3rd and Dec 17th. All you have to do is sign up and show up. Just showing up gives you a chance to win some great prizes, so its totally recommended. Here’s an overview of what will be talked about in the webinar:

Visitors are increasingly using mobile devices to search for churches information, listen to sermons, and pay tithes and offerings. Your church members are mobile, how about your church? On this webinar we will be helping churches understand how to get their message through, on the most important method of communication today: Mobile Phones.

What you will learn on this webinar:

  • 3 Major myths about cell phone usage that are not true.
  • Dissecting the noise about mobile websites and mobile apps.
  • Tips on using mobile to increase donations & giving.
  • Why your church cannot afford to not be ready for mobile.
  • How to not to miss up to 50% of people searching for your church.
  • Connecting members to small groups using text messages
  • Keys to integrating Twitter and Facebook with mobile.

You’ve got two more times before the year is out. Sign up for this webinar and learn more about the services Symbiiota offers at their website.

Roar’s eBook Interview w/WORDsearch

The future of publishing is something we discuss from time to time here (being an online magazine, it only makes sense to). Therefore, hearing that a frequent contributor to MMM was interviewed by Roar – a company which produces an excellent suite of mobile app and content management tools – to speak on the impact that eBooks have had on Christian publishing at large. Here’s a snippet:

When looking at the future of publishing, ebooks play an integral role.

While many of us may think ebooks are a pretty new development, WORDsearch has been creating books in electronic format for over 20 years. “Every title that we publish through WORDsearch is an ebook that can be read through our advanced Bible study software,” says LaRosa.

The transition from paperback to digital is already taking place, and it will continue to grow going forward. “Technology and innovation are driving us in this direction, both in hardware and software,” he says. “Devices like the Kindle and iPad have cemented ebooks as a mainstay, and why wouldn’t they? The functionality of ebooks far surpasses that of print books.”

Read the rest of Ebooks: A Win-Win for Both Publishers and Consumers at the Roar Blog

Also, do check out Roar’s Mobile Content Management plans and strategies; this probably one of the best complete packages for mobile and social that you’d find the faith-based space. See more in the below video.

Mobile Prayer Journal

Recently, we got a question asking about the availability of a mobile prayer journal. Here’s the question as it was sent into us:

Could you recommend an easy to use prayer app that I cold use on my computer and iPhone

Now, a search in the Apple App Store (using the word “prayer”) would show that there are a lot of applications designed to help you pray, however this listing has several limitations (and interestingly enough, we don’t list any either):

  • You don’t get Christian prayer apps, but also those for other faiths
  • You get apps compatible with the iPhone/iPad, however there’s no indication that any of these would also work on a PC/Mac/Linux computer, and…
  • You get nothing but screenshots displaying the interface and aspects of use

The person writing in really did have a simple question in mind, but there doesn’t seem to be a decent answer that can come from this.

In our reply, we mentioned that instead of a prayer app (since the desire is to also use this on a PC/Mac computer), that perhaps using an existing cross-platform Bible reader such as OliveTree would be useful. Within the OliveTree domain, there are plenty of prayer-led devotionals, that work alongside the Bible content. In addition, OliveTree’s applications also offer an ability to save notes and follow a reading plan – making it quite useful as a prayer journal. Its a bit of a cobbled solution, but one way that this could work.

Other apps such as Logos, YouVersion, etc. could probably also work in this manner. However, none of these are designed as a journal first, then something that facilitates this aspect of making notes about or for prayer needs. You could go the route of using a notepad application – perhaps something that was designed more like a wiki that can connect to people in your address book, or to text messages that came in. But, I’ve not seen much in terms of that direction, aside from the mountains of developers who keep writing notepad apps.

So, instead of putting together an idea for such an app (can you tell we already have), we’d like to pitch that question out to you and ask you what might be your recommendations for a prayer journal that works both on a mobile device and a conventional computer. Leave your answers in the comments and let’s see if we can figure something out for our prayerful contributor.

Personalizing

One of the things that we can all say that we do to our mobiles is that we go about customizing it. Usually, that starts with something simple such as adding a wallpaper that has someone/something significant on it. Others go the route of adding cases to their devices – first because of protection needs – because of the ease at finding something unique for both a personal statement and visual message. Or, we might go the extra step with ring-tones/ring-back tones so that people who hear our mobiles know that its ours. This is part of a route that I tend to take, and delight very much in doing what I can with applications such as Situations (Google Now, Tasker and Locale are similar apps for Android devices) to customize how my device acts in a particular moment.

Some people go a bit further, we learn how others might have reprogrammed their mobiles and go about building custom applications and services to plug into our mobiles.  And even further more are those people whom hack, jailbreak or root, or just use it (ah the fun of those folks using Maemo and MeeGo mobile devices; which come out of the box ready to be tinkered with) and find opportunities to personalize the mobile experience such that they are able to gain the most out of the device, while learning or exercising in the process. One could make the statement, the process of making the device “yours” goes a long way into ensuring that the experience of a mobile device or service stays relevant.

I wonder then about the parallels to when we start using these devices and services in our faith experiences. True, there are only so many routes that one can go with this kind of intersection, but I wonder if our experiences with mobile devices also opens us up to the potential of having faith experiences that are more personal than communal or liturgical?

When we meet God speaking and engaging with others in the Bible and religious history, we see first a personalized experience that later becomes something that a community of people are able to take part in. Moses engaged God first at a burning bush, and it was after many moments of fellowship and conversation that the burning bush moment became something that was (asked by God) to be an event shared with all of Israel (Moses telling them to prepare themselves for the Lord will come off the mountain… then to “Moses, you speak to God for us” – an unpersonalized faith interaction). Its interesting, because we have these devices that in some respects acts like this moment of the person or item being right there with us, and we can customize the channel to do so. And at the same time, we can customize it such that we also isolate ourselves from one another, or even from sharing the faith with one another.

YouVersion and many other Bible apps offer reading plans. These reading plans are usually designed (or authorized) by another party, and then you engage with them. Depending on the Bible application, you can either keep your progress personal, or share your successes and challenges with a community built around that application or service. Should our faith be so easy to personalize then? Or, should the items that we use to bolster or mature in the faith, keep us mindful of the fact that some aspects of this walk do need to happen in the closet, while others would be better walked out with others?

Image via To Live is Christ

Where to Start w/Mobile


Though we’ve talked about this a few times, the question of where to start with mobile, once you’ve decided to go that direction for some aspect of communication or engagement is a difficult one. What’s great though is that there are several of us in this faith-tech space that have tackled this. Here’s a piece from Symbiota’s answer to this:

A mobile app is software designed for such mobile operating systems (and their corresponding distribution programs) as Apple iOS (the App Store) and Google Android (Google Play); an app is generally useful for executing specific actions, such as listening to a podcast, playing an interactive game, or making a purchase. A mobile website is essentially a sleek, stripped down version of your native (desktop-friendly) site; with a mobile website, the content may be stacked vertically for easy scrolling, and much of the graphics from the native site may be streamlined or removed.

Read the rest of Help! My church wants to go mobile; where do we start? at Symbiota. And take note of the chart after the infographic – those six (6) points are about as clear as it gets towards understanding your direction in mobile and ministry.

Another Symbiota plug: We’ve started adding Symbiota’s webinars to the #mobmin calendar as many of these are quite relevant connection points to what’s happening in faith and tech from a resource/learning perspective. Subscribe to the #mobmin Calendar to get updates about these and other events.

7in of Near Perfection

iPad (1st gen) and Amazon Kindle Fire HD

There are just so many new gadgets out there, and for the most part, its a crazier world when it comes to tablets. For those who might have been coming from a PDA or eReader background, the idea of a 10in tablet is wrought with some significant risks (weight, platform lock-in, etc.) alongside the obvious gains. And so the 7in tablet begins to take some root as a potential alternative. From a physical standpoint, we’re talking about something with a bent towards reading (unless you’ve got a Samsung or HTC model with a stylus and those neat styli tricks). From a software perspective, we are mostly talking about Android (I’m still wishing for something solid to come from the Mer/MeeGo camp). And then from a usability and faith end, we get that really interesting ask of how this shape of device fosters a maturing faith perspective and a life lived in light of such perspectives.

I’ve recently purchased a Kindle Fire HD to potentially replace my 1st gen iPad. And while I’ve begun to note some of my impressions about it, I’m not yet completely comfortable giving the KF-HD all the work that I gave my iPad. These are different devices, and not everything that one tablet can do should be done on all others. At least how they have come across so far, the iPad is more of a canvas (you can’t do much until you add the paint of various applications), and the KF-HD is a catalog (the 21st century Sears/JC Penny catalog) – I dig into that distinction some on my personal blog.

Still, I can’t help but thinking that there’s a legitimate space for this size of device, and what we can continue to refine about our understandings about mobile as it relates to faith. For example, a few days ago Mobile Advance asked (via Twitter) something specific towards the Google Nexus 7 tablet for an upcoming African trip. Of note to his question was this ability to utilize a device in a mostly offline context. Here were some of the apps recommended in that conversation stream:

Essentially, these are apps which enable taking a 7in tablet and treating it more like a Moleskine notebook and not just a browser/ebook device. I don’t know that anyone can disagree with that perspective. But, its neat that in a device that is this size, that such a use-case isn’t so far away from normalcy. (And in rethinking about it, I forgot to mention a multi-language dictionary; too many years going online for those moments, whoops)

And besides that, you’ve got to think about how that shifts how you use your mobile device. In my case, having the KF-HD makes me use my smartphone more. I don’t know if its because I haven’t adapted to using it as easily as I have my iPad, or that its just faster to continue on this current workflow by using my N8 (and a recently acquired Lumia 900). I can see how someone who has a laptop and doesn’t want to remove that from their lifestyle will use a 7in tablet alongside a low or mid-range smartphone and be just fine in some of their computing pursuits. At least with the Kindle Fire/FireHD, I’m not sure that this is a perfect size to be a netbook/laptop replacement – even though the range of solid 7in tablets and their attending software points in that direction. I do think that its a near-perfect size though to replace a high-end smartphone and larger tablet. Which might make for some interesting decisions for many when it comes to costs of computing over time.

As with the iPad, I expect use and perspectives to mature over time with this new tablet. And to be honest, I’m not totally sold on it just yet either. Its nearly perfect, but as I’ve said in some other ramblings, my usage could be better done with a phablet (phone+tablet) like the Galaxy Note II, or a solution like the Asus Padfone 2. I’m a weird one though. My device choice here is honed for a question to be answered much later. For you, the 7in (or even 8.9in and 10in) tablets might fit your usage needs a bit better. Much like we’ve talked about building a Bible app from the perspective of a layman, not a pastor, there’s something to be said for a smaller screen that might fit the usage and mental models of a different type of person that just isn’t as widely heard. We’re listening for that here now, and whatsoever the results of adding this to the #mobmin utility belt might bring.

eInk Bible App for Kindle


Of the items that come across the window that are pretty neat and worth talking about, this eInk Bible App for Kindle devices is a pretty decent one. Here’s a description from the website:

…The e-ink Bible app looks and functions just like an e-book, but it has improved navigation and searching capabilities. Like an e-book, you can:

  • read continuous stretches of text
  • bookmark verses of interest
  • add notes

In contrast to an e-book, the e-ink Bible app:

  • always displays the current reference
  • allows quick navigation
  • supports complex searches…

For those of you with a Kindle, or with folks who have black and white (eInk) Kindle devices, this seems to be a pretty neat solution that’s just a little bit better designed for the context than simply having an ebook Bible.

Just A Phone

sketch by Antoine RJ Wright, sketchnotes.antoinerjwright.com, via Dropbox
During my recent trip to Helsinki, one of my friends asked me if it really is possible that someone could do all of their necessary computing (re: live) from just their phone. They cited things like needing a larger screen for movies or games, and just the general discomfort of having much of what they interact with happening on a 3-5in screen.

Well, you kind of know my answer to this line of questioning. But, I wanted to open it up here as there was a conversation on another website which also brought this topic to light that reentered my view.

The perspective of computing where I am from (USA and middle class) is that there are more and better screened options to do various types of computing. There’s the automotive dashboard or cylcing computer for transportation. There’s the TV for home media viewing. There’s the mobile and tablet for personal media viewing, gaming, and creation. There are tablets made for collaboration. And other examples. Given all of those available screens, it is easily the assumed practice to master each of those interfaces within their specific domain because they are available to you. When you don’t have (or want) a TV, you morph the smaller screen of a mobile, understanding its limitations and using a few of its benefits (sitting in bed with your favorite programming on-demand-style).

However, I chose to go about computing differently, and hence the question from my friend. Clearly, they were impressed that I could do so much from a mobile and tablet. But, they had very little context of what it meant to go about computing when the mobile was the primary or only means of doing life-by-PC. One of our friends on the trip was from an area where the majority of people didn’t have access to much more than a mobile and perhaps a radio or community TV. They could see how my lifestyle choice lent me a perspective into how they lived a bit more than some other commentators on mobile. And that’s really where this article, and conversation topic comes from. They said simply, if I had the choice to live mobile-only, but there was more, most people would chose the more instead of the only. With many not able to make that choice, sometimes, we have to consider our brothers and do our best to see through their eyes – was my response to these.

And so I’ll put the question to you as it was put to me. Could you see a situation where you had a mobile or tablet as your primary computer? If so, what challenges would you run into personally, professionally, spiritually, etc.?