Apps I Use – Part 3: Web Apps

Apps I Use – Part 3: Web Apps

by | 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...
Applications I Use Every Week – Part 1

Applications I Use Every Week – Part 1

by | Sep 14, 2009 | Featured Articles, Ordinary Pastor, Pastoral Ministry, Technology, Time/Life Management

[YouTube Video] Hey everyone, today’s blog post (and a few others this week) is a screen cast from my desktop in my study at home. I am currently using a 2.4 GHz iMac. I also have a MacBook Pro for portability (I’m hardly ever without my laptop) and its set up exactly like my iMac. What do I find to be some of the best applications I tend to use every week? Which are some of the most helpful to me as a pastor? This week I’ll be taking a look at my desktop and sharing with you the apps that find their way into my workweek. In general, just take a look at my doc (the bar of icons at the bottom of my screen). I don’t have any on there that I don’t regularly use. I’m going to give a quick overview today and then throughout the week, I’ll screen cast some details on those that I find most helpful. Finder. The way you find your way around the Mac environment is basically through the “Finder.” It’s comparable to Windows Explorer in the Windows environment. Pathfinder (instead of finder). It is much more versatile and worth the small amount it costs. It makes Windows Explorer and Mac Finder look useless. Safari (I’ve left Firefox behind for the most part). Google. For e-mail, calendar, contacts, chat, and tasks. Also Reader. Few Google docs.  I will review a number of the web applications (WordPress, Picasa, etc.) that I use all the time. Dropbox.  This is an excellent file sharing and synchronizing software.  You can share any files with anyone,...