by Bret Capranica | Sep 19, 2009 | Featured Articles, Ordinary Pastor, Pastoral Ministry, Technology
In this post I want to review a few applications every ordinary pastor (or person) can readily make excellent use of – and the best news is that all of them are free. While the web can be a major distraction for productivity, it can also be an amazing tool for getting things done. Here are tools from the web I use every week (some almost every hour): Safari Web Browser: I have been a Firefox fan for a long time. I loved the various plugins available that gave me greater connection to social media like Twitter. However, I’ve found that having constant connection to social media while working on high priority tasks on the web is too distracting, so I really use few plugins on Firefox any longer. The new Safari 4.0 I have found to be faster than Firefox. It certainly loads faster and is speeder in browsing the web. It also has a cleaner interface than Firefox. I have gone back and forth with Firefox and Safari, but tend to find Safari to handle my needs more simply and faster than Firefox. Email. I have all of my e-mail accounts dumping into my Gmail system. Our church uses Gmail with our own domain name. We can have access to one another’s calendars on the web or on our iPhones. Gmail via the web has been my mail client of choice for months. It loads very quickly and I have instant access to all my mail. I can quickly mark all of my mail read and star those I want to follow up on. I have a general rule that I respond to...
by Bret Capranica | Jun 19, 2009 | Featured Articles, Personal, Technology
[YouTube video blog] What are you favorite iPhone apps? In honor of today’s release of the new iPhone 3Gs (of which I do not own . . . yet), let’s talk about which apps you like most on your iPhone. What? You don’t have an iPhone? O.K., well you need to ask for one for Christmas. So, to indulge in the truly meaningless, here are my favorite apps on my phone – some of which make me more productive and others that balance out my time wasting: Out of the 81 apps on my iPhone here are the ones on my Home Page – my most used and most favorite apps: Address Book. All of my contacts reside here. The iPhone is great with its address book. Searching for names among the hundreds of contacts is very easy. Integrating maps with the address for a one tap step has helped me on many occasions to figure out how to get to someone’s house for a visit. One failing on the iPhone that I had with my Palm Treo (didn’t have it with Balck Berry either), is with one tap I could assign a single ring tone to everyone in my address book. Meaning if someone in the book called, they had a distinct ring. If someone outside the book called, they had another distinct ring. I didn’t even have to look-just listen to know who was calling. Apple is still behind here – though I use the address book very often. Evernote. I can’t say enough about Evernote. It is the best electronic notebook I have ever used (ct.,...
by Bret Capranica | Apr 20, 2009 | Featured Articles, Ordinary Pastor, Pastoral Ministry, Technology
In my quest to live off of the world of free applications for a month, I’ve shed my addiction to Microsoft’s Outlook and have completely moved to Google. I’m not sure I’ll ever go back to Outlook. Some of this I have reported on in my previous post regarding Gmail. But to be more specific in regard to Outlook: First, here’s many of the ways I used MS Outlook: Grabbing mail from multiple e-mail addresses Rules that pulled mail into particular folders. I.e., my inbox was restricted to only priority mail from church members, pastors, my wife, and a few others I needed to hear from quickly. All other mail went into the “Other” folder. MS Exchange Server. Through a tech company we have been using, they set us up with Exchange, which has allowed instant synchronizing of calendars, tasks, e-mail, and contacts. Organizing mail into folders for quick reference. I had only four folders: Inbox, Kel (my wife), Pastors, Members, Other. I could search a folder for finding an e-mail. I relied on search folders to keep up with mail that I needed to respond to but did not have the time to handle in two minutes or less. Calendar. I used a personal and a church/public folder. My public folder was available to staff and our receptionist. Tasks. I heavily used the Franklin Covey overlay for Outlook. If you know anything about the Covey system, this overlay organized Outlook to look like the Covey paper planner, and also brought e-mail in. I actually loathed to use Outlook without this overlay ““ Outlook, without this element is a...
by Bret Capranica | Apr 7, 2009 | Ordinary Pastor, Pastoral Ministry, Technology
10 Reasons why an ordinary pastor (or anyone) should consider using Gmail. 1. It’s free. Gmail is a part of the free world of Google. All that is required is an internet connection (not free). Sure several other e-mail services are free. Your workplace gives you a free account, but this one is yours and no paid hosting service is necessary. 2. It’s simple. Anyone can quickly be up to speed with Gmail. No desktop mail software necessary. No account set ups for desktop clients. Just sign up with Google and mail is yours. The learning curve is easy to get up to speed. Even using some of its more advanced features is relatively simple to grasp. The help sections of Google are simple to navigate. Learning to use labels, stars, search, etc., requires little time and effort. 3. Search. This is Google’s bread and butter ““ and in Gmail as well. If your file is large, Outlook is cumbersome and lags when trying to search. I often cannot quickly find what I’m looking for. Gmail search has been simple, accurate, and fast. 4. Spam. I seem to get a lot of spam through Gmail, but I rarely have any of it hit my inbox. Gmail does an outstanding job at catching the spam-far better than Outlook or Yahoo. 5. Accessibility. Since it is browser based, Gmail works with any operating system (PC or Mac). Gmail works on mobile platforms, so that no matter where you are, you have access to your mail and it is always in sync with the multiple platforms you may use (desktop, laptop, mobile,...
