Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Google+

Who needs social networking when facebook and twitter have it all wrapped up right?

After many false starts, it seems like Google has come up with some really cool ideas of how to make it better. Dubbed Google+ they have done some great forward thinking about how social networking should look and how to do it. See the tour here.

The first good idea is circles. The idea here is simple: You don't want to share everything with everybody. Family might want to see 900 pictures a day of your child, but your co-workers probably do not. Circles makes this possible and simple.

Huddle is another really good idea. Basically it's group chat, but if it's simple to setup it will be useful for things like agreeing on what movie to go see or where to go to dinner etc. Things that help social networking move from the internet to the real world are always good, IMHO.

Check it out!

Joel

Tuesday, June 21, 2011

ChMS - iPad Kiosks

One of the most desirable aspects of our check-in system is that check-in works on iPads. More churches talk to us about our check-in for this feature than any other. The question that always has to be answered though is how to secure them.

Our production director found these:


Made by a company called ipadikiosk.com, they answer the question of how to secure ipads for use in a public location. They can also operate with the ipad plugged in, making them easy to use without having to charge them every week (like we do now). The whole thing is held securely in an attractive kiosk. There are three styles, two free standing and one for tabletops.

The downside is that like any well made product, they are expensive. The tabletop models are $275 each + $50 shipping and the freestanding ones are $500 each + shipping. This takes away some of the "it's cheap" appeal of the ipad, but it's still a good solution for kiosks.

We don't have any of these yet (Today was the first time I'd ever seen them) but we will consider them for our next campus which opens in September.

Joel

Tuesday, June 7, 2011

The tyranny of the urgent

I have 506 messages in my inbox, and 495 of them have send dates of May 26 or later. How does this happen? I don't think any of them are spam, so the rest require attention of some kind.

The issue is always the tyranny of the urgent. In this case I've done a wedding, rebuilt servers, upgraded our bible software and trained our teaching pastors on it (far more work than it sounds), presented a third campus budget to our board, etc. In short, it's been an extraordinarily busy couple of weeks.

The problem is that now I am stuck. Do I clean out my email box, something that is likely to take days, or do I tackle the other things on my todo list (something that is hopelessly buried on my desk which looks like my inbox). All of the emails are recent, so they really should be addressed while they are fresh. Add to that my schedule in the next two weeks and I feel that if I don't do it now, the problem will simply multiply.

Sigh.

I shudder to think how bad this would be if I didn't handle about 50% of my email on my iPhone.

Joel