I haven't been able to use my iPad Pro 11 (2018) nearly as much as I've wanted these past few months, largely because I'm chewing through a ton of videos and graphics every week during this virus. But last week, I was able to dust off the 'ol iPad and get back to writing. It was a refreshing escape from the endless deluge of videos every week. Could I do videos and graphics on my iPad? Sure. But right now where there are deadlines almost every day, the Mac is more familiar for me and I have established workflows there.

But my iPad has become my writing and research machine, my entertainment device, and my everything else device. It's where I go when I want to check out a website or read an article. It's where I go to watch tutorials on YouTube on how to do something complex in Final Cut Pro.

The apps in the dock are used every day, and most of them at the same time in Split Screen, so we'll focus there, as most other apps are self-explanatory.

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iPad Home Screen, May 2020. Click for larger.

Starting from the dock separator and moving left, I have Drafts. I've recently had a Drafts renaissance - I've replaced several other apps with Drafts and I've found a few new ways to use the app.

Ever since Drafts added Taskpaper support, the ability to handle To-Do lists in plain text on the app has been very valuable. That's not going to be everyone's cup of tea, and I love Things, but it lets me customize it exactly how I want my task list to look.

Working left, the next app is Ulysses. This app had a big update last week adding mouse support (Magic Trackpad on the iPad is wonderful, by the way) and also something I've needed - external folder support. They've had it for a long time but it didn't work correctly, but now this has changed the game. Being able to store my Library in Markdown text files in Dropbox but also use Ulysses' great writing environment is wonderful.

I've been using the Brave browser almost exclusively for a month now, and I'm happy with the results. I wish that iOS would enable default browsers, email apps, etc. so I could use it more effectively, but alas, it will have to suffice for now. Brave is good at what it needs to do and the interface doesn't get in the way.

My Bible translation of choice for the last 15 years has been the Engish Standard Version, and I've found that the ESV Bible app is very good. It's pretty vanilla but it accomplishes what you want - looking up and reading Bible passages and then copying them into your lesson. It also supports Split Screen.

Fantastical is the best calendar app in the Apple ecosystem, period. It's got a great design, quick sync, and I'm happy to pay a couple of bucks a month to support great devs like those at Flexibits.

Spark is my email app of choice because, well, there's not anything better in my opinion. And that's a low bar. I'm not blown away with Spark, and I guess I shouldn't be. It's a solid app with less bugs that a year or two ago. It's nicer than the stock email app. It has a good dark mode and now allows (with an update last week) for changing fonts and font sizes.

WeatherUp is my favorite weather app, and it's because it's a radar-first weather app. I like seeing the rain coming, and so WeatherUp does that beautifully. They have a great selection of weather icons and app icons too.

Still on Tweetbot. I've tried using the stock Twitter app several times and have wanted to throw my phone in a lake. Tweetbot is just so simple without all the cruft of the stock Twitter app.

1Password - self-explanatory password manager. The best there is. They've also waived their free trial period for the app during Covid-19. Go get it.

Spotify is now my music service of choice. I rage-quit Music after it failed to play half the songs on my playlists for like the tenth time because I didn't have a perfect connection. That's really the only problem I had with it. It was just very unreliable for me on an LTE connection. Your milage may vary, and Spotify seems a lot better at this. Songs seem to play a lot faster. Spotify also seems like music discovery is easier and that it just "knows" me better. Is that weird?

Overcast - also self-explanatory. If you listen to podcasts at all, go get it.

My last two icons on the far left of my dock are shortcuts - Dictate to Drafts and AirPods Connect. One touch and I'm dictating into Drafts, using my voice to transcribe to text. The AirPods Connect shortcut is extremely handy - one tap and it connects my AirPods without having to fumble around with Settings. This is especially nice if you switch between devices frequently as well.

[Note: if you download either of the linked Shortcuts here, you will need to change a few things to make them work on your devices, namely changing the Airpods name in the Airpods Connect Shortcut.]

I won't talk about any of my apps outside my dock other than Reeder - which is a fantastic RSS client, and Apollo - which is a really great Reddit client. Other than that, I tend to use the Fantastical widget on the left side, alone with the Shortcuts widget to quickly do some tasks with one tap.

I really enjoy the iPad. I would like to be able to use it for professional-level video one day, but I don't see that anytime soon. But as far as everything else, the iPad is more than capable and I'm continuing to learn new ways of using it.

Monday in San Francisco, Apple kicked off WWDC, their Worldwide Developers Conference. As a minister, why should you care about such things? I'll give you few reasons why. 

The iPad is Changing. There may be some new products on the horizon, i.e. the rumored 12-inch iPad Pro, but even without that announcement yesterday (Apple has since stopped making major product announcements at WWDC and stuck to developer stuff), the iPad is changing. 

There was some stuff demoed that we will see with iOS 9 in the Fall that is amazing - it's what the iPad should have been all along. If you're a minister and you use the iPad on a daily basis, you're going to be impressed with what Apple is doing. 

Two of the biggest things on the iPad - working with text and multitasking - have been completely redone. Now you can have two apps running side-by-side in tandem and resize the windows. This isn't a revolutionary thing - Samsung has been doing it with tablets and even phones for a while now - but it's wonderful to have on the iPad. Now you can have two Bible apps open at the same time, or an internet site open in Safari on the left and a writing app on the right. Pretty sweet stuff. 

The other is text selection. We preachers live in text. At least I do. And Apple has designed an intuitive form of text selection that nearly looks like a trackpad. You can depress two fingers on the keyboard and zip around to highlight text and move your cursor. Very cool. Much faster than dragging your finger in just the right spot and getting frustrated when it goes below the line you wanted it to. 

The Mac isn't changing. I say that because Yosemite was a complete redesign of OSX, and yes, it has more bugs than an abandoned hotel. But this release, named OSX El Capitan (named for a rock face in Yosemite National Park...Leopard > Snow Leopard, Lion > Mountain Lion, Yosemite > El Capitan). El Capitan is focusing on performance and stablity, so in effect, Apple is slowing down the on new features in order to make the current ones work much better. 

Search on iOS is getting better. Universal search on iOS is going to be much better thanks to deeper integration. What does this mean? It means you can find more stuff that you need quicker. Siri will be lots more useful, a la Google Now on Android devices. Siri is more intelligent too - you can say "Show me photos from Florida last October" and it can fetch those photos, provided you have them synced in the new Photos app. 

The new Notes app. 

Notes I can now finally recommend. The built-in Notes is an app that lots of ministers I know use a lot just to jot down things they come across. Notes wasn't very functional or useful in my opinio. You couldn't style text or insert pictures. Now you can. Not only that, the app has been redesigned for all platforms - iPhone, iPad, and the Mac. And it syncs via iCloud so you don't have to worry about it. I still think there are better note-taking apps for your phone and tablet - Drafts, Editorial, and Simplenote to name a few - but Apple is really making strides with the app that 75% of their users use because it's just there. 

This was only a few things that Apple announced of many, but these things will continue to improve my experience on iOS and the Mac and I know as ministers it will benefit you as well. 

For the last year, I have been looking, searching, researching, trying out, and tweaking what I thought might have been the one solution to my workflow woes. You see, what I want isn't hard - a simple synching solution for me to be able to compose classes and sermons on my computer (or iPad mini) and have them sync to my two other devices. I had some criteria when I began this mission:

1. It must sync to my iPad mini, because I do all my teaching and preaching from it. Additionally, it must look great and I must be able to format it in a way that I can easily glance at my notes when presenting. 

2. It must be on iOS. A companion Mac app would be helpful, but not essential. iPhone app is also not optional as I do a lot of tweaking on the go. 

3. It must be simple. No crazy layouts or unnecessary button on the app - just...simple. 

So, I narrowed my list down to three applications for my workflow: Evernote, Simplenote, and Plain Text. 

 

Evernote

Evernote seems like it's been around a long time, and that's because it has. It is a service that has never been accused of standing still. Evernote continually pushes new designs, additions, and features to its suite of apps which now include Penultimate and Skitch. 

Pros: Evernote is very well designed. The iPad app is beautiful on a retina iPad mini screen (and on the iPad Air as well). The apps are designed to easily do what you want to do: capture anything and everything. Evernote can capture text, pictures, voice memos, and even has embedded To-Do lists. It allows rich-text editing (bold, italics and such). It syncs fast across all devices, has a Mac and Windows app, and is also cross-platform on Android and Windows Phone as well. 

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The Evernote iPad app is gorgeous. 

Cons: For me, it seems a bit too much. I don't often need to capture photos and voice memos, only text. So I end up completely ignoring those features, mostly because I refuse to pay for a premium account ($5/month or $45/year). I did have a premium account for six months and didn't use the features. While it's a great app for 90% of people, a power user like myself who wants simplicity above all else isn't going to be using it very much. Still a great app though. 

Simplenote

Appropriately named, Simplenote is just what it says it is - simple note syncing across devices. I was just about ready to declare this platform dead when Simplenote relaunched with a new web design and app design as well as an introduction of a dedicated Mac app. I really thought this was going to be my solution. 

Pros: Extremely simple and well designed. Fonts and text look great and a retina MacBook Pro and retina iPad mini. The app is active in development and syncs well with other devices. There is no clutter to deal with in these apps - they simply allow you to compose notes, title them, tag them, export them, and pin them to the top of your list. Composing and writing in these apps (as well as the Mac app) is a joy. 

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Simplenote for Mac. 

Cons: It's almost too simple. Simplenote allows no formatting of any type and does not support Markdown editing, so if you want to style your text at all, you are limited to bullet points, numbering, and capitalizations. This sounded great in theory but I've noticed if I can't bold some text or make section headings bigger in my notes then I frequently lose my place while teaching and preaching because all the text looks the same. Tagging is great, and if tagging is your thing, you're going to love this app. If it's not, stay away, because that's the only amount of organization you get from Simplenote. All you have is a long running list of your notes, in order of what was last edited first. There's the option to 'Pin to Top' which comes in very handy.

I've run into some sync issues (as late as Oct-Nov 2013), but most of those seem to have been ironed out. The apps still crash on me frequently (once to twice a week) - I don't think a day or two goes by that the Mac app hasn't quit for no apparent reason and once the iPad app crashed on me while scrolling and preaching in front of hundreds of people (ack!). The iPhone app has a bad bug where it will crash when trying to sort changes in a note. I know developers are active on this app and I love Simplenote, I just cannot afford to use something that's unreliable. If the apps were stable enough, I might have this as my go-to platform. 

Plain Text

And here we are, talking about the joys of plain text once again. I really don't know why I migrated away from plain text, but it seems that my search has brought me full circle, back to where I started. 

You may read this and discount the plain text preference as an uber-nerd thing, but, in fact, it's really not. It just works. 

Pros: You can use a variety of text editors on all devices and plain text formats, including regular ol' .txt, Markdown, or Multi-Markdown. Markdown allows you to style your text how you want without changing to rich-text format. It uses simple symbols like asterisks to indicate bold and italics and hashtags to indicate headlines. Comes in handy when you get it down. The app I love to use on the iPad is Editorial, and on the Mac it's Byword. You can usually sync these apps to Dropbox and keep them in nested folders, easily categorizing what you need where you need it. Apps like Editorial, Nebulous Notes, and Byword are minimalistic and usually offer inline Markdown support, so you can see your bold and italics and headlines while writing. Best of all, plain text is future proof and my files are not tied to any platform, so I can move them around as I please. 

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Editorial for iPad. 

Cons: No simple "Compose it and forget it" syncing. Syncing is pretty painless, but requires a little bit of file management as well. Syncing isn't instantaneous unless you save your files in the app you're using. So unlike Simplenote and Evernote, you can't just sync and go. Plain text may not appeal to many people because it's not as simple to set up as other services. There's an extra added step when syncing to Dropbox, and you must know where your text repository folder is located. 

So looking at these three platforms, jumping back and forth between using them for the last year, I realized that there really is no "one solution" for capturing all my thoughts, pictures, and text (long or short). One solution is finding a small, precise suite of apps that fit your purposes. I'll use Editorial and Byword for all my writing (70% of the time), Simplenote for lists and occasional text capture (20% of the time), and Evernote for pics and logs (10% of the time). 

For me at least, one solution ends up being three solutions. 

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. 

iOS 6 on the right, iOS 7 on the left. 

I'm not into market research, sales numbers, or even demographics when it comes to technology. But I can tell you one thing: when iOS 7 rolls out today, it may be the most popular and most widely adopted iOS upgrade to date.  

Why? Because of kids. I have had more kids ask me, "When is iOS 7 coming out?" than you'd ever believe. Keep in mind, this is an OS upgrade. We're not talking about a new video game or a huge concert - this is an OS upgrade on a phone.  

Right now, on the record, I predict that iOS 7 will be the most popular upgrade Apple has pushed out. Ever. And it will be on over 80% of all capable iOS devices in less than a week. 

Watch out, Apple, your servers are about to get hammered.  

iOS 7 will roll out across time zones (like every other iOS upgrade) gradually today. People in Central and Eastern can expect to get the update some time this afternoon.