Really love the new iPhone app for Facebook – especially because you can view pages and add them to the home page.
That reminds me. If you haven’t already, you can become a “fan of” Faith Promise.
Today we launched our first Internet Campus with iPhone streaming, and it went great. Josh was kind enough to get me some screen captures on his iPod Touch, and you can see them below.
The Faith Promise Internet Campus continues to make progress, and thanks to the help of Brad Roberts and the folks at Light Cast Media, we’ll be testing out streaming on the iPhone this Sunday at 10 & 11:45 am. This is a brand new technology, and I’m glad we get to jump on board so early in the process.
If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, you can test things out by going to http://faithpromise.org/icampus. If you go there on an iPhone or iPod Touch, you should just see a iPhone specific countdown page. From there, you’ll be able to select whether you want the stream with or without sign language. (Yes, you’ll be able to stream the sign language video on your iPhone.) Even without an iPhone, you can see what it looks like here.
If everything goes well, in addition to the iPhone stream, we will also see substantial improvements with both our audio and video quality. Matt James has helped me to set up a better encoding process, and Phil Bledsoe helped me to work out some kinks in the audio – providing the iCampus with a better range of sound.
What a blessing to work with such a great team! Pray with me that our iCampus will continue to make an impact in the lives of people online.
OK, enough playing around. Today we’re serious, and I’m looking at a the top three web apps that have been especially helpful to me over the past few weeks and months.
1) YouVersion (mostly the iPhone app) – This application continues to be something that I use at least once a day. I’m still doing my daily reading on the iPhone, and they keep making improvements on the .com site as well. Really an amazing resource that you need to check out, if you haven’t already.
2) Mvelopes – This personal finance application is really top knotch. It’s taken the weekly chore of entering and classifying expenses down to the simple process of dropping the expense into the corresponding virtual envelope. I expect that I’ve already saved dozens of hours in the few months I’ve used their system.
3) Freshbooks – This is a time tracking and invoicing application. I’ve always been bad at tracking my freelance time, and many times I’d end up doing updates for free, but now I’m able to easily track my time and produce invoices from the time I’ve spent. I’m still new to this one, but I’ve been very impressed, and the corresponding iPhone time tracking application is very helpful. Best of all, they allow you to manage up to three clients for free.
I thought it would be cool to mention a few web applications that I’ve found to be especially useful over the past few weeks, but I think I’ll save that for tomorrow. Today, instead, I want to mention a useful hilarious web program that had me laughing like a fool at my desk today.
It’s called Translation Party, and what it does is take an English phrase and convert it to Japanese using Google’s translation API. Then, it translates the Japanese back to English. It repeats the process until the two phrases match in English and Japanese (“equilibrium”). Google’s translator is good, so sometimes nothing too interesting happens, but sometimes it gets pretty funny.
Here’s a couple that turned out pretty good:
I love my job, and one of the things I get to do each day is make decisions. Decisions like:
I hope that I make good decisions most of the time, but even when I don’t, I often get the opportunity to revisit those decisions again. The Deaf interpretation on the Internet Campus is a good example of this very thing.
You see, when we first launched the Internet Campus, I got a kind email that I quickly dismissed as outside our scope for the Internet Campus. That was three months ago.
Fortunately, our Graphic Artist Heather Burson, mentioned the idea to me a few weeks later and cast a vision for the impact the iCampus could have in the Deaf community. This second time, I listened.
Has that every happened to you? Have you ever dismissed an idea but later come back with a new perspective?
Right now we’re working on a big-time secret project that I couldn’t be more excited about. I can’t say anything yet, but we will be making an announcement soon.
For those of you who are so kind to visit this blog regularly, I want to give you a few little hints (not so that you’ll start guessing, but so that you’ll be praying with me):
I know I’m a dork, but I was really looking forward to this OS update yesterday. Apple added some really nice additional features to the operating system of the iPhone.
If you’re on Facebook, and you haven’t yet picked out your custom url/username, now is the time to do it. I just got mine, and below are the screen shots.
I was hoping to get a url for the Faith Promise FB Group and new Faith Promise FB Page as well, but you have to have 1,000 members, and we’re still a bit short of that. Fortunately, they’ll open that up in a couple of weeks, so I’ll grab that then.
Just last week, Google unveiled a new piece of software that is still in development. It’s called Google Wave, and it looks like it will revolutionize the way we communicate on the web (including emails, photo sharing, document collaboration, and blogging). It was developed by a team of people including the guys who built Google Maps, and it looks amazing even though it’s not finished yet.
The best news of all: it can run directly inside of modern web browsers (HTML 5), and it’s being released as Open Source (free & expandable by others).
The video is over an hour long, but if you want to get a quick snapshot, forward to 11 minutes into the video.
