I am sitting here as I write this post typing on a new Macbook Pro with a Retina screen. You've seen a Retina screen before - any iPhone since the 4 has had one, so odds are, if you have an iPhone in your pocket, it has a retina screen.

One of the biggest drawbacks of the iPad mini was its lack of a retina screen. It has the same resolution as an iPad 2, only squeezed into a size that was almost 2 inches smaller. Lots of people love the smallness of the iPad mini, and some have even said that the iPad mini outsold the iPad 4 two to one. People really like it. 

Now the iPad mini has a retina screen, and the resolution on it is even better than the new iPad Air. I haven't seen one yet, and the word is that supplies this holiday season may be severely constrained, but this very well may be the best iPad for preaching, teaching and writing yet. 

Why? Because of text. 

Text rendering on Retina screens is extraordinary. And if you're a preacher, teacher, writer, or anything in between, you live in text. You take notes in text. You read and write in text. 

There are lots of great apps for the iPad mini out there - Simplenote and Editorial are a few of my favorites - that take complete advantage of the sharp, un-pixelated text rendering you find on a Retina screen. The best part is that the text rendering is built into the system, so as long as your app runs and has been updated for a retina iPad (which most of the have and are now required to by Apple), the text in any app will look crisp and clean. 

For example, in my workflow as a youth minister, I do a lot of writing, copying and pasting, reading, and presenting. I have all my notes in Simplenote (which has a really nice Mac app as well). I compose my lessons and sermons in Simplenote and they're automatically synced to my iPad mini. I can't wait to see what my words look like on a Retina screen, not to mention how much easier it will be to read while presenting. 

If you need to format your work and make it look great, Apple's Pages is also a great place to start. You can even print to several cloud-enabled printers using AirPrint. 

I won't be getting a Retina iPad mini immediately, but I'll definitely be checking them out as soon as I can. If you're in the market for a 7-inch tablet, the resolution on the Retina iPad mini is certain to please. 

As a guy who is in the market for a new Mac myself, I figured I would do a no-nonsense, easy to understand buyers guide for all those who may be contemplating getting a Mac. And also, since Apple came out with a slew of new stuff including new Mac and software, there's never been a better time to buy a Mac. 

If you've never used a Mac as your personal computer, you're in for a treat. You get a clean desktop experience with a great Mac App Store ecosystem to play with. Best of all, Apple said yesterday that all their apps (for both Mac and iOS, excluding the pro apps like Final Cut and Logic) are going to be free with the purchase of any new Mac or iOS device. 

That being said, if you go to an Apple Store, the clerk is going to be honest with you. They're not going to sell you a pro machine just because they want to make money. One big difference about Apple is not just their products, but the way they sell them. Sure, you could get a maxed out MacBook Pro with all the bells and whistles, but do you really need that, and do you want to spend that much money. Apple customer care is all about getting you, the customer, the right product, not the product that will help inflate profits. 

So if you've never bought or used a Mac before, you'll need to know that as of yesterday, the entire iWork suite (Apple's much better version of Office, which includes Pages for word processing, Keynote for presentations, and Numbers for spreadsheets) is now included for free. You can download them for free using your new Mac. No more buying $200 worth of software, keeping up with product keys and all that junk. You just need an Apple account - the same one you use to download apps on your iPhone or iPad - and you're good to go. 

Give Up Microsoft Office

These Office-like apps are a huge deal - the main complaint I get from users who want to switch to a Mac tell me, "Well, I just can't give up Office." Yes, you can. Apples iWork apps export to all Word, Powerpoint, and Excel formats. I use Pages every single day and everyone else in my office uses PCs with MS Word. I've had no problems in 4 years using nothing but Pages. People also tell me, "Well I have to use MS Word for work." Again, you can export any Pages document into MS Word format, to PDF, or into plain text, or even ePub. It's simple. 

While there is a learning curve with these apps, as there is with anything new and unfamiliar, I would venture to say that you'll have iWork apps figured out inside of 3 days. You'll wonder why you wasted so much time with Word and Powerpoint when you can use the elegant and simple Pages and Keynote. 

Below is a chart explaining some things about what machine you might get if you were buying a Mac today. 

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1. The only machines on this chart that are desktops are the Mac Mini, iMac, and Mac Pro. I put a 'maybe' here for the Mac Mini and Mac Pro because they are such small devices, especially the Mac Mini. You could fit a Mini in a small backpack and carry it around and hook it up to your different monitors if you so choose. The new Mac Pro is a great deal smaller than the aluminum monstrosities Apple has been selling for the past several years. 

2. The speed of your processor seems to matter less and less these days with dual- and quad- cores (literally extra processors to crunch your data) and RAM, SSDs and OS management have made processor speeds not so important. So don't harp on this number too much, especially with the MacBook Air. The Air was the first Apple laptop to incorporate Solid State Drives (SSDs), i.e. drives with no moving parts. This greatly speeds up your computer. All Macs now have the option for SSDs now. 

I'm going to be spending a lot of time over the next month giving you snippets of my new eBook, A Minister's Guide to the Mac, due out on November 26. The first half of the book will help any minister or professional transition to a Mac for the first time, while the second half with give you helpful apps, tips and tricks to help you make the most out of your Mac and can help even the most advanced Mac user. 

New computers, new iPads, and new software to launch us into 2014

Apple has made it a big day for preachers, youth ministers, and teachers.

There has never been a better time to join the Apple family. I've been a huge Apple fanboy for years - and rightfully so. Because they make the best hardware and software that money can buy. People gripe about the price of Apple products, especially the computers. Yes, it's a bit of a premium price tag, but what kind of quality do you want? Do you want a laptop that's not going to flinch for four years and offer you great performance and dependability, or do you want the $400 PC that's going to give you problems 12 months in? 

A big deal today was the fact that Apple announced that all of their apps in the iLife (iMovie, Garageband, and iPhoto) and iWork (Pages, Numbers, and Keynote) suites will be FREE. Mavericks, the new update to the operating system for the Mac will be FREE. There has never been a better time to buy in to the Apple ecosystem. 

Apple also introduced a new iPad Air, a thinner, lighter regular-size iPad with a new chassis but the same 9.7-inch screen size. If you're an iPad Mini fan, they also updated it with a retina display. If you have a newer iPad with a  retina display, you know how much of a difference it makes reading and writing, which is what preachers do most of anyways. I've preached and taught from an iPad for the last two years, and I'll never use paper again if I don't have to. 

The only thing we didn't see today was an update to Apple TV. If you haven't looked at Apple TV for your church or your home, you should. It allows you to mirror and display things wirelessly through a projector. It's also a very nice streaming device for your home television. Almost every church I know of uses Apple TVs to display content, keynotes, songs, and everything else. 

Back to the computers: Apple released updates to their MacBook Pros today, AND dropped the price by $200 on each model. The retina screen is fantastic, and for those who work in a word processor or read books on your computer all day, this is the machine to do it with. And with Apple making the iWork apps free - Pages for Word Processing and layouts, Numbers for spreadsheets, and Keynote for presentations - there's really no reason to spend extra hundreds of dollars on MS Word, Powerpoint and Excel just to have to upgrade them in 2 years. 

Look at it this way: you can go the Windows route, and buy a new Surface 2 for $449. Don't forget the keyboard for an extra $120. Then you have to subscribe to Office 365 for $99/year. So over the course of 4 years, you will have spent $1,069. Or you could just buy a MacBook Air $999, and get all the app and OS upgrades for FREE. And that's provided your Surface doesn't get the blue screen of death during that tenure. 

Never before have I been able to confidently say that someone, especially church offices and preachers, should make the switch to Apple products. Until now. 

I've been using Apple products exclusively (I kicked MS Office out of my life the second I graduated college) for over 5 years now, and I've been an Apple user for over 10 years. I can tell you that you will not get the customer service, the build quality of hardware and software, and more enjoyment out of using a computer or device that you will from an Apple product. No, they're not perfect, but they're a whole lot better than the competition. 

I'm going to be spending a lot of time over the next month giving you snippets of my new eBook, A Minister's Guide to the Mac, due out on November 26. The first half of the book will help any minister or professional transition to a Mac for the first time, while the second half with give you helpful apps, tips and tricks to help you make the most out of your Mac and can help even the most advanced Mac user. 

The preaching to you about the value of the Mac and Apple products starts now. It's time to kick that PC to the curb and get yourself a real machine to work with. 

Have you ever been reading a document, book, or handout and said to yourself, "Man, this is some great content. I really want to use it in my next class/sermon/talk, so I guess I'll just have to type it all out into my notes"?  

I have, many times. As preachers and teachers, we are always taking content from commentaries, papers, and other sermons - and if it's not on the internet already or in a Bible program where you can copy and paste, you have to manually type that content out into whatever notes you have, and that can take valuable time away from your study and preparation. 

Enter PDFPen Scan +. This is an app for iOS that enables you to take a picture of any document, book, or text on any page and convert it to text that you can edit, copy, or paste anywhere you want. And it's great at it too.  

PDFPen Scan + uses OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to pull the text out of a PDF. You make a PDF out of the document by simply taking a picture of it with your iDevice. You crop the page to fit, then the document is stored in iCloud and synced to all devices running PDFPen Scan +. Then you can choose to OCR that document - literally pulling the text off the page - and share it via email, text, Dropbox, and many other options. 

I find PDFPen Scan + to be especially helpful with old documents that I have on paper but don't have an actual file of that document. It has really come in handy.  

Unfortunately, there's no trial version available since Apple doesn't do that, but you can PDFPen Scan + for $4.99 in the App Store. That's a small penance to pay for the power of this app.  

Check out the video by David Sparks as well. It gives you a real sense of what this app can do.  

Simplenote is an app that I've loved for a long time, but several design choices like small text on the iPad, unreliable syncing, and too simplistic of a design with mobile apps has made it unusable in my opinion. 

Until now. 

Simplenote, in late August, unveiled a complete redesign of their mobile apps for all platforms, including iOS for iPhone and iPad and also for Android. I've been teaching and preaching from it for the last 30 days exclusively. 

I was very excited about Editorial for iPad, with it's great interface, configureable buttons and layout, customized workflows and Markdown support, and I had purchased it and began using it when the new Simplenote came out. Needless to say, I was impressed. 

For the longest time, my workflow included plain text editing with Elements on iPad and iPhone, syncing with Dropbox, and I would actually preach and teach from within Elements. But Elements, at least for me, started getting buggy, even with regular updates. (I'm sure it's been fixed, but 1 or 2 crashes while I am speaking to 300+ people is 1 or 2 times too many.)  So I stopped using it and turned to Nebulous Notes.

While syncing with Dropbox offered some flexibility (like seamlessly offering my lessons as .txt files for download on my website, copying and moving files, and making backups easy), I found that it was a few too many steps. I would compose a text file in my Mac text editor of choice (usually Textastic), save it as either a .txt or .md file if I wanted limited styling, make sure it was in the correct folder in Dropbox, then search for that file under my Elements directory to pull it up on my iPad for teaching. 

With Simplenote, I write my lesson in the Simplenote app for Mac (which is incredibly nice by the way), and my changes are automatically pushed to my devices. All I need to do is load the app on the iPad and whoosh - it's there. And syncing with SImplenote is incredibly fast. 

Another thing that helps is local note caching. All my notes once synced will be available for edit and viewing whether connected to a network or not. I've had lots of speaking engagements where there is no connection whatsoever - even through a cell network - and my notes, provided I synced before I left, are there. No having to worry whether or not that 7th revision to my sermon synced to the correct folder and file in Dropbox. Dropbox doesn't append the file (unless you're using specific programs), it re-uploads the entire file if one letter is changed. I know text files aren't that big to begin with, but when you're out in the middle of nowhere with little or no data connection, every byte is hard to come by. 

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Simplenote Mac app. Click for larger. 

I mentioned it before, but what helped push me over the edge was the Mac desktop app for Simplenote. You can see for yourself that Simplenote really lives up to its name with its very spartan and minimalist interface. The changes are almost instant - I can type and sentence on the desktop and watch it be pushed to the iPad app seconds later. It's great. 

I love Editorial, plain text, and Markdown, but to tell you the truth, I don't need any of that. All I need is text, and the new redesigns for the mobile apps make the fonts much easier to read and far better to compose in. And if a worst-case scenario happens and I lose all my devices, including my Mac, my notes are all backed up on Simplenote servers. I can log on to simplenote.com and edit and back up my notes from there. 

If you're looking for a simple, elegant solution and don't want all the fuss with saving file and formatting, look no further than Simplenote. It's free and it's wonderful. What do you have to lose?