Feb 21, 2012

Find My...Family [Remix]

A little over a year ago, I explained how to find your family members using the Find My iPhone app, assuming that you are using the same iTunes account for each phone. With Find My iPhone, you can see where each iPhone or iPod Touch for that iTunes account is on a Google Map.  While this is great for keeping up with kids or avoiding that "where are you now" call when your spouse is driving (a safety risk), it had its drawbacks.

Feb 14, 2012

Seek God for the City: Using Your iPhone or iPad as a Prayer Tool

Our church is using the Seek God for the City 2012 booklet as a guide to facilitate prayer for the church and for the world over a 40-day period ending on Palm Sunday. Your church may be doing the same. While most people may use the book, if you have an iPhone or an iPad, you can use the app that just came out as a more convenient guide for doing this.

I downloaded it and started looking at it tonight. Like the book, it leads you through a couple of Scripture-based prayers as well as guidance to pray specific things for the church, your city, the nation, and the world. However, unlike the book, the app has a number of extra useful tools:
  • When praying for the nations, it will link you to the Operation World information for each nation that you pray for. This is invaluable in being able to pray specifically for a country.
  • It has a great reminder system, one that other apps would do well to follow. It allows you to add a number of independent reminders to pray throughout the week but still makes it possible to add a reminder for every day at the same time without a lot of effort. You can have more than one reminder a day and the app will alert you when it's time to pray.
  • You can mark favorites and pray them later, even after the 40-day period is up.
  • Before or after the 40 days, you can pick a particular day's prayers or let it pick a day from random.

Feb 2, 2012

Tips for Listening to Pandora on the iPhone

One of the first apps that many iPhone owners download and begin using is Pandora. It's a natural choice for a mobile device, allowing you to play music you would like but don't necessarily own wherever you are. It's also a great way to get introduced to music you've never heard, but that you are likely to enjoy.

After first setting up an account, the typical Pandora user starts listening by creating a station by choosing an artist.  Let's say our user is John Deaux and he chooses the artist is "U2".  Pandora creates a station called "U2 Radio" and starts playing music by U2 and by others similar to U2. From there, the John clicks the thumbs-up icon when a song plays that he really likes and thumbs-down when a song plays that he doesn't like. As John continues to listen to the "U2 Radio" station, it begins to adapt to his likes and dislikes and play more of the songs that he likes.