Life-changing Christian Hedonism »
The question I most often hear in response to this is that if God loves himself pre-eminently, how can he love me at all? How can we say that God is for us and that he desires our happiness if he is primarily for himself and his own glory? I want to argue that it is precisely because God loves himself that he loves you. Here’s how….
The tablet wars have been re-stoked by the advent of the Kindle Fire. So critics and reviewers everywhere have been doing the first thing that comes to mind when they review the Fire: they compare it to the Apple iPad. This is ludicrious, and I agree with the post on LockerGnome.com in that the price point between these two negates the comparison. Customers should expect a significant difference in features between a $200 Kindle and a $500 iPad (let alone a potentially $800+ model).
But what we may compare is the craftsmanship of the two. Apple products usually come out on top.
Amazon’s products aren’t always as revolutionary or innovative as even the B&N Nook. And while we’re on that matter, why are there so few comparing the Kindle Fire to the Nook Tablet? Obviously, these two devices are the one’s competing in the “New” category. And even so, there are noticeable price and feature differences between the two.
Maybe what we should be comparing the Fire to is the Nook Color, which was released last year. If I were putting my money in a new tablet, I’d go for the Nook Tablet. If I were comparing Nook Color to the Kindle Fire, I’d probably go with the Fire because I’d expect the Fire to be an improvement as a newer product.
Would you pre-order a new smartphone, game console, or book from Amazon, B&N, or Apple? If so, such products by large organizations give you some assurance that they will deliver the products. There reputations proceed them.
So what if the product doesn’t currently exist, and your pre-order would pay for its production? What if the company behind the product is just an idea someone has? Well, you could become an investor with your pre-order of their products. That’s what Kickstarter does. It makes it possible for startups to reach the consumers first, and the investors follow.
If the product never reaches the market then you will get a refund. Think about that. The better ideas will get funding, and the poor ideas will be rejected by the consumers. This hasn’t been possible till now. Not like this.
And some craftsmen are given opportunities to produce that would never survive the development processes of larger corporations.
Click image to see original article
Ben Balser just released a tutorial for X. Grant you, he has his product invested in Apple’s new editor, so he is going to like it and promote the professionalism of editors using FCP X. One might question whether he has a serious bias towards Apple’s product because of his considerable investment in it.
Even so, this isn’t to say he is biased. I like what he says in the quotes from this article as he’s taken the time to wrap his mind around the paradigm shift Apple introduced in FCP X. He’s got his head in the game — unlike many pundits that have lashed out at X without giving it thoughtful consideration. Ben notes there are simply significant traits to X that are not conducive for consumers. And the recent free update Apple released fixing various bugs and what-not had everything to do with addressing professional editors concerns — not the whimsies of soccer moms.
Of course, this is just one article that’s extolling FCP X. There are many others. Such positive articles are just not heard of as much as the quarreling forums of rabid independent editors that are drawing a crowd for blasting Apple products. Disliking something about Apple is ever in vogue. Well, I hope to be above such simple-minded trendiness, and find out for myself what FCP X is really made of.
Starting tomorrow, I’m aiming to produce my first video ever in X. It’ll be put to professional use from day one in my workflow. Do I expect to encounter some bumps along the way? I’d be a fool if I didn’t. I will soon see just what to make of the FCP backlash, and whether X is or isn’t as professional as everyone is debating. I’ll keep you posted!
So I finally got an iPhone (and a 4s at that!) after all these years of loyal Apple gadgetry use. As a conscientious spender — in spite of using all things Mac since 1992 — I’ve always thought that I would wait to get an iPhone till I could justify the expensive data plan. Now that I can, I’m retiring my old trusty iPod Touch and using the 4s in full swing.
What I am addressing in this post are my experience with the new iPhone and my greatest disappointments with the new iOS 5.
How I make use of an iPhone
Don’t get an iPhone then find uses for it to justify your possession of it. I wanted to have a genuine use for the device before I purchased one because they are expensive when you consider the monthly bill with AT&T (or other phone service). For me, it boiled down to several pragmatic uses for the tool:
• I need a reliable way to reach family with a call at any time.
• I need constant reminders for various meetings, projects, chores, events, etc.
• As my calendar gets fuller with each passing month in life, I need a constant handy tool to track events.
• A growing majority of my human interaction with friends are on social networks when it’s convenient for them — thus timely access to social networks is essential.
• Then there is the cool reason: I’m reviewing iOS games for AllThumbsGaming.com in the near future. The new speeds of the A5 chip processor in this phone will be put to good use.
• Lastly, what filmmaker doesn’t want a good camera on their person for any unique moment?
So reasons aside, what do I think of the phone? Well, I can’t compare it to previous generations of iPhones as I am a new iPhone user. As a newbie, it’s very user friendly. I like the way it handles system preferences and navigates around apps. The one thing I want more readily accessible is the brightness controls. Burying them in the preferences is a hassle to change evening and morning to save my eyesight.
Of course, I’ve had other cellphones before this one. There is no comparison. Other brands that half-heartedly attempt to offer music, gaming, and social networking services infinitely disappoint. Then again, you get what you pay for. Cheap phones hardly give you any real useful features. Apart from the phone calling aspect.
Anyway, the biggest advantage of the new Apple phone over all others on the market is Siri: the voice command personal assistant app built into the iOS. I use her a little more than I’d anticipated. She’s good for everything she’s designed to do. She schedules events, reminds me of my to do items in a timely manner, answers complex math equations, looks up stuff in an encyclopedia (of sorts), looks up any word or phrase in Google, sets my alarms, takes dictation for emails, plays my music… All on my vocal command. I find that as long as a use a clear and natural speaking voice that she’ll correctly understand most everything I speak. Siri is handy in that she reduces many steps it would otherwise take to perform everyday iPhone tasks. Not to mention she can make you smile at her clever work around your challenging questions.
How iOS 5 disappoints a seasoned iOS user
I want to ever find more practicality in the iOS as I do not use a laptop or desktop when I’m away from the office. My computing is all reduced to an iPhone and an iPad on the go and in my living room. As useful as the devices are, there’s just a few issue I take with their shortcomings.
First, they just got a built-in dictionary. It is a duh. Dictionaries are usually more useful than calculators (which the iOS has had on the iPhone since the first generation). So, yes, it’s finally got a dictionary, but the silly part is that to use it there isn’t a dedicated dictionary app, as there is a dedicated calculator app. To use the dictionary, you have to be using various apps with editable text or a PDF or an ebook. Then, you select a word and ask it to give you the meaning. So the dictionary is under the hood, as it were; it’s solely a part of the underpinnings of the iOS. This is one handy application of a dictionary — having it on hand while you write and read — but it seems obvious to me that at times you simply want to look a word up in a dedicated dictionary app.
Secondly, what’s with Twitter integration? This seems awkward to me. Where is the Facebook integration? This new iOS has twittering services built in — so much so you can install the Twitter app right from your system preferences! I use the twittering tools myself, but where are the glaringly missing Facebook tools? Twitter is seriously one-up on the iOS now amongst the social networks, and this is a disservice to iOS users because most everyday users are using Facebook ten times more than they use Twitter. Facebook is for all of life. Twitter is mainly for hobbies and professionals culture. So while it’s nice to have handy access to Twitter from more apps, it’s strange that Facebook is slighted. Hopefully, future Facebook integration is in the works for, say, iOS 6.
Thirdly, iOS 5 lacks new beautiful wallpapers. This is not mission critical for new iOSes, I know, but as much as I like the current assortment of flowers, textures, and funky art wallpapers, there is lots of room to grow for some appealing background images that would liven up the iOS. Most of the backgrounds available today were with iOS from the beginning (more than three years ago) and only a few were added with the first generation iPad (two years ago). Apple is good at the backgrounds they provide, so they just need to add more of them with each significant update. Backgrounds put a new face on a new iOS. Yes, I know there are many websites that provide backgrounds for these devices, but 90% of backgrounds out there are lame, generic, amateurish, or distasteful. Apple set the standards high with their backgrounds and I think they should continue to broaden the best of the best selection of backgrounds.
These things I point out aren’t to say that I dislike iOS 5. I just think these three issues are obvious areas for improvement. With over 200 (supposed) improvements in this iteration of the iOS, many of these improvements are unnoticeable to everyday users. So features like those I’m suggesting would be a bit more significant to everyday users that spend lots of time iOS-ing. As someone that spends little time on Mac OS when I don’t have to for work, I just want to flesh out some of these small things so I encounter less disappointment in iOS’s shortcomings that pertain to everyday use.
So what do you think of the new iPhone or iOS 5?
I’ve been using Lion now since the day after the release, July 21st. That’s not long, but it has given me a good enough time to experience the most obvious enhancements and encounter noticeable bugs. Lion exceeds my expectations in the latter. Bugs: what bugs? OS upgrades are known for them, so the intrepid Apple user usually waits a few weeks before upgrading their OS. Well, I’ve been using Pages, Evernote, Mail, Safari, Chrome, Firefox, FCP 7, SP, iTunes, and the like, and haven’t encountered one glitch. Of course, I have always found Safari slower than other browsers, and this is still the case in Lion, but that’s not an OS problem.
As for the goods of Lion, I became a fan of the Finder just about three years ago. I’ve only been using Macs since 1992, so you think I would have become accustom to the primary method to sort and organize files by 2008, but I hadn’t. I struggled to grasp the metaphor, as it were. Thankfully, one day it just clicked.
Mission Control: I'm still experimenting with it, but I think I like it.
So I was naturally concerned when reports were saying Apple had made Lion more like an iOS. I was wary that the Finder might be dumbed down, too minimalistic (or, at least, heading that direction). This hasn’t occured. In fact, I love the enhancements to the Finder and Spotlight. If you are a regular organizer like I, you shouldn’t be disappointed.
A lot of the improvements that users will see are in the asthetics. Of course, if you don’t have an eye for such things, you may be disappointed in the upgrade as a whole, since Apple has painstakingly tweaked each pixel to make the overall image softer on the eyes. Harsh (or crisp) edges for various icons have mellowed out, making me think everything looks “pillowy”. This is certainly not a downside to Lion. Like I said: if you don’t care about the little details of aesthetics, then you may not care. If you are an artist/designer, you’re probably going to study these changes with fascination and respect for Apple’s thoughtfulness in design as it directly impacts the users’ experience for the better.
A great deal of the changes Lion brings are found in the System Preferences. For instance, one of the major detractors of Lion for Apple and PC users alike will be the “natural” scrolling. Natural scrolling means the way you’ve scrolled up/down/left/right on the mouse has been reversed. I know; that didn’t seem natural to me either when I heard about this change. Who wants to re-learn scrolling after 20+ years of experience learning it the “unnatural” way that largely had something to do with Apple’s standardization of mouse controls on the earliest graphic interface operating systems?
Well, as it turns out, most such changes you won’t care for, as with the scrolling, are reversible in the System Preferences (SP). SP has on the whole been refined and is more pleasant to peruse. If you want your old-fashioned scrolling, you’ll quickly find it under the Mouse controls.
Mac's Mail is one of my favorite parts of Lion's upgrades.
My favorite native improvements come to Mac’s Mail. This app that delivers and organizes your emails has been a staple of the OS for at least a decade, right? But I can’t think of anyone who’s used it for more than ten months at a time (besides my brother). Mac Mail just hasn’t offered conducive organization and hassle-free settings in the past versions. In general, I’m pickier about my mail client experience over that of other native apps—like the dictionary—since I spend so much time in it whether I like it or not. Mail now is my one and only emailing client, I’m happy to say. It’s re-design is significant and the new features work well.
If you’re thinking about making the upgrade but aren’t sure of it, I say it’s safe and a pleasant change that you should go with now. If you’re old school and don’t trust a review no matter what because you just know that the OS will mess your workflows up, then you should probably not upgrade till your computer dies and your forced to. In either case, I I’m giving Lion my stamp of approval.
Transformers: Dark of the Moon is one of the few pop-culture driven movies that I wanted to see in theaters. I knew the special effects would be mind-blowing, as the previous two were. I usually enjoy the character of Sam Witwicky and some of the more intelligent Autobots. Still, part of me knew that I would not “like” the film before I saw it to review for Movieology. But why?
Since I had not previously had to think critically about the other two Transformers films, I enjoyed them as, for the most part, mindless joyrides of visual stimuli. Sure, I’m not a fan of the poor taste in objectifying women, crude humor, and outlandish plot contrivances, but there was still something to had in the films. They were amazing displays of imaginative creatures from deep reaches of the universe. Transformers’ transformations are some of the most creative ideas in kids’ action/adventures of the 20th century.
So why did I know that Transformers 3 simply wouldn’t be an objectively good film? I couldn’t say, honestly, till I had finished and was leaving the theater. The answer is simple: Michael Bay (the director) leaves the worldview of the movie inconsistent and wanting fulfillment. The post-modern caricatures don’t do justice for the film’s own worldview, in that by the end the heros rely on each other and their social norms. The chaos and random quality of the Transformers’ movie universe that escuses all forms of “don’t rely on culture” in the end has to appease a culture-driven audience.
If Bay wanted to write and direct a credible and compelling story, he would have, but that was not his goal. He has consistently dished out popcorn action, special effects, and confusing awkward/inappropriate humor in the place of good storytelling.
I often ponder what God means for us to do with the subject of beauty as it applies to our own fallen physical states. We humans tend to wilt in appearance without any effort on our part. We take a shower and eight hours later our hair is oily and our skin will be stinky. It takes considerable effort to keep healthy and trim—let alone go above and beyond appearing healthy to look physically attractive.
Many thinkers conclude that external beauty is a trivial matter God doesn’t want us to dwell upon. I get that it’s difficult to find good fitting clothes and the right fat to muscle mass ratio, but is giving up on our general appearance the right solution? Is the only reason we dress nice and comb our hair to impress others in public or to look qualified for a job at an interview? I don’t think so.
God didn’t design anything about the world to serve man’s shallow/sinful desires or misappropriated notions. Believers aren’t supposed to look good on the outside for man’s sake, but for God’s sake. As we strive to glorify God in all that we do, inner and outer beauty are important to the Lord.
But why? Why does God care about our external appearance? What biblical argument is their to support this view?
This issue arose on the blogosphere over the past few weeks. Christian blogger Tim Challies wrote on the subject of why Christian wives should make the effort to look attractive to their husbands. Challies stated:
What is outward is significant. Clothes make a statement. There is a spiritual dimension to what a person wears. Clothes can be used to attract attention and they can be used to deflect attention; they can be used to serve other people and they can be used to hinder other people. The same is true of hair (Peter speaks of both clothes and hair in 1 Peter 3) and jewelry and anything else outward…..
The way a woman relates to her spouse is a spiritual matter. And the way she dresses, the way she cares for herself, is a part of the way she relates to him. It makes a statement about her, about him, about them. Her words speak, her actions speak, but so too do her clothing, her appearance, her hygiene, her adornment.
His post was a response to another’s, and due to his post their were hundreds of comments that resulted. Ultimately, the issue was unresolved and there was a great matter of the debate left to be considered.
Then Mary Kassian, author of Girls Gone Wise chimed followed up to Tim Challies in this post. I have got to say her answer is very insightful and agreeable. It is easier to understand why God cares about outward beauty when one relates it to God’s relationship to the Church. Mary states:
Many scorn beauty as “a passing pleasure.” They think that the illusive, fragile, fading, temporary, and wrinkle-and-stretch-mark-prone nature of female beauty indicates that men (and women) should just “get over it” and focus on more important things.
Beauty is indeed a passing pleasure. But I think there’s a deeper meaning here that we dare not trivialize. The symbolic importance of beauty/beautification is not unlike the symbolic importance of marriage. Woman’s beauty, and all the broken, distorted ideas about it, will not so much pass, as give way—in the end—to that to which beauty points. There will be no marriage in heaven because the shadow will give way to the reality. Likewise, the illusive, fading, temporary beauty of women will one day give way to the breathtaking, spectacular, eternal beauty of the Bride of Christ.
Both Chalies and Kassian make apt points in their posts and I encourage you to read them in relation to the subject together.
Christians should consider why God gave us the deeply rooted desire that our spouses should be attractive to us. We should consider what our appearance communicates symbolically to our fellow man. Beauty doesn’t have to be about looking sexy—as is the worldly standard. Rather, for God’s people, outward beauty is the depiction of the spiritual condition and our relationship to our Lord.
Pessimism is:
The individuals’ natural self looking on the facts without a cause outside of self to give significance of the facts.
We look on the surface of current events, statistics, and history and make a determination that says, “Who know where this is all leading us, but if you just look at the facts, it doesn’t look like the road ahead is good.” This is where pessimism, worry, fear, angst, and the like all dwell—just on the facts.
Pessimism doesn’t reach for the meaning of said facts.
Meaning is the purpose those facts have in the whole of a story. Story has meaning. We tell ourselves a story, and we add meaning to it. Every story is either going to be hopeful—like a comedy—or negative, like a tragedy.
Stories are what give us the liberty to hope no matter what the facts may be. Knowing the absolute purposes in life (why we’re here, Who’s planning all these events to take place, why the facts are) gives us reason to hope; to see past the facts recognizing that these facts are just parts of a greater story that has a good ending.
This is why there is more to be had in the truth than in the facts.
Truth is:
The purpose of the real story (which happens to include facts).
If you look at “just the facts,” you will end up with determining your meaning of the facts with the absence of hope, because hope does not lie in empty facts; nor does hope lie in you. Hope lies in an authoritative source of meaning: God. God is who makes hope possible. God is Who gives meaning to meaningless things—like facts.
I wrote this list up for a personal friend, then I thought I should share it with the world. My favorite apps aren’t necessarily the most mainstream well known apps for their respective tasks, but ai find them very helpful and gratifying. I hope some of these might be rare gems you benefit from as well.
2doThis app is my task manager. It’s easily to figure out, full-featured, sync-able with MobileMe and ToodleDo, etc. I love the design of it and it’s easy to track personal and work projects with it. I use it instead of a desktop task manager or written todo list.
When it comes to the simplest of note-taking, there is nothing like Notes which comes already installed. If you use Evernote, it’s good too, but I find Evernote does too much that I don’t need in my note-taking. This list was written in the Notes app.
If you don’t care to write in Notes for the aesthetics, or you simply want a clean interface to write lengthier texts in, PlainText is the economical route coming in as free of charge. It syncs with Dropbox, so it’s easy to keep your files in order. PlainText keeps it all super simple (feature poor) but it’s very robust, easy to use, and clean.
EssayThis was the best app I ever spent money on in the App Store. This is my favorite writing tool on the iPad. You can format text in HTML, so when you open it on your desktop all the formatting is good to copy and paste into a web browser, or paste into some other word processor. This app also syncs with Dropbox. Oh, and one of the handiest features: ‘undo’ mistakes as you would with desktop apps. ‘undo’ isn’t available in many iOS apps.
This is a swell way to read your Google Reader RSS feeds. Mr. Reader makes it easy to share articles with others. The only short coming for the reader is that if you have a lot of feeds it can take a few minutes to update.
If you don’t want to pay for an RSS reader, and it isn’t important to you to keep you feeds in sync with your Google Reader, then Flipboard is the very best reader for you. It has a uniquely fun way to read your feeds, it’s easy to add new ones, and it simply gives you an enjoyable reading tool. I’ve read with Flipboard for many hours straight.
This is a great way to save web pages you come across to read later on the iPad. You can read articles free of all ads or other distractions. It syncs articles with wifi so you can read them later offline. The app seems a little pricey at $5, but it’s worth it to me because I use Instapaper continuously.
What used to be called ‘Words with Friends’ is one of my favorite games. It’s basically Scrabble, but it’s cheeper. The free version is easy to use. Many people play it, so you will find (most likely) people you already know play it on their iPod, iPhone, or iPad (like em). Networking with others and playing on the network is a breeze.
My personal alternative to Safari is Terra. This web browser has tabs, but otherwise is very similar to Safari. It seems to run faster than Safari, and has a nice simple ‘full screen’ option. You can import bookmarks to Terrence from iTunes on your Mac. Inevitably, I end up in Safari at times, but when I can, I use Terra.
This great app is AppShopper.com designed for the IPad. The website and app are very useful. Whenever I’m shopping for new apps, AppShopper is where I begin looking for something I have in mind. It can be easy at times to find good free apps from their ‘popular’ list as well.
I don’t use Dropbox for very much on my iOS devices, but when I do, it’s extremely helpful and easy to use. I trust Dropbox more than I do my own hard drive. I’m sure there will be more helpful uses for it in the future too, so it will only become more useful.
This is a simplistic flashlight of sorts. Use your screen to see in the dark when any other light source is inconvenient. It’s handy in a dark hallway when you trying to find the bathroom.
Friendly (the free version) is a great app just for Facebook-ing. I don’t spend all my FB time on the iPad in this app, nut it’s a good interface for many casual social networking tasks.
HootSuiteIf you do much on Twitter, Facebook, or both, HootSuite is simply a no-brainer. This app let’s you send links/updates to one, the other, or both at the same time for multiple accounts. And you can read from the feeds of multiple accounts simultaneously! All it requires is an account on HS’s website, and last I checked the app was free. While you can’t do all of your FB browsing with HootSuite, anything that it can do it does so much better than FB’s website or Friendly can.
There are several ways to browse Wikipedia on the iPad, but this is my personal choice, and it’s free.It’s easy to use and loads quickly. One of it’s best qualities is the text size is largely by default for Wikipedia pages than if you go to Wikipedia in a web browser.
This is the Bible I use for personal study and church services. The ESV is my favorite translation, and this free app is hard not to like. It’s be nice if it had more study tools, but I’m okay with it since it’s free.
For the history trivia you didn’t know you wanted to read, This Day. As it implies, it offers tid-bits of relevant date-related facts for each day out of the year. you can read it as a daily digest, or look up specific dates (like your birthday).
There are several good air hockey games on the iPad, but this one is free and I like the way it plays two player. The computer player isn’t half bad either.
This is one of the most enjoyable pastimes on the iPad. This clever game has you firing off birds in a sling shot to attack pigs that have stolen the bird’s eggs. If you haven’t heard about this game, then you’re the last person on earth to hear about it.
This is a fantastic multiplayer game. I enjoy playing this game with people who like trying new things. It can get pretty zany. What’s really cool is that it’s fairly enjoyable in the three and four player modes.
This is the most expensive game I’ll recommend, and because of the expense I almost didn’t mention it. Abut it is one of the best designed apps for the device and has many mind boggling levels. This is a great single player game that will take a long time to finish.
Art Studio for iPadI personally don’t think it’s very practical to draw pr paint on the iPad yet, but if you’re interested in giving it a go, this is the app I’d use. It’s got lots of great features, and tools. It is used by many professional artists that have shown off what the iPad is capable of.
Everyone talks about the Kindle, and if you have one it makes sense to sync it with the Kindle app on your iPad, but if not, I would recommend B&N’s Nook app before I would recommend the Kindle’s. nook has several handy features that outdo the Kindle app, and it syncs well and is easy to make online Nook purchases.
iBooks almost ties with Nook, and overall, I like to use it for reading PDFs and reading the occasional book. If I’m not in the mood to use the Nook app, I use iBooks before I use the kindle app. The dictionary is the best of the three, and I like the note-taking of iBooks. Oh, not to mention highlighting….
For kicks, this is a great free piano app. It sounds good, works well, and shows off the power of the iPad to others if you’re giving a demo. Of course, if you buy GarageBand, then Virtuoso is unnecessary, but it is a good substitute for goofing off with the keyboard.
Who doesn’t like to hold the world in their hands? This is another app for kicks. It’s not as practical as the Maps app, but it’s a good demo for friends.
I wouldn’t use any other way of getting my ema on the iPad at this time. I’m sure there are good options, but none if them that come near the efficiency of Mail. Mail just works, and it’s easy to get all you email in one place (if your provider is compatible with it).
This is one of the greatest pleasures of the iPad. It’s in some ways easier to use than putting your music on the iPad if you usually have a wifi connection.
Remote ProIf you would have any usefulness in remotely controlling your Mac with the iPad–say, while using the computer to watch movies–then this is a handy tool to do so.
If you could use an app synced to Rotten Tomatoes, then this is the app for you. I use this to look up showtimes, plot summaries, watch trailers, etc. In my case, it’s especially helpful for Movieology.
If you want a good free clock for, well, the, y’know…nightstand, this is the right one. Still, it doesn’t have a good alarm, so I recommend you look elsewhere for a good clock for waking up in the morning.
