Technology – Page 2 – MacYourMom.com

My review of the Touchfire, the Kickstarter iPad keyboard

I like to back Kickstarter products, especially Mac and iPhone-related gadgets. In the past I’ve backed and received an iPad stand and power adapter covers (not to mention a coffee gadget, some musical productions, and more). Maybe it’s the hope and promise embodied in the little guy with a big idea.

So when I heard last fall about the Touchfire, an iPad keyboard, and watched the video, I knew I had to back it. After a series of manufacturing delays (you get a good lesson in the woes of product design from being a Kickstarter backer) and a re-design caused by changes in the iPad 3, I finally got my new Touchfire a couple of weeks ago.

It’s pretty remarkable and mostly lives up to the hype. While it’s designed to tuck up under the Smart Cover when not in use, I feel like it’s a little too bulky to keep there so I keep it in its case. And I think you will benefit the most if you’re a touch typist. But even if you’re not, you will still benefit from the tactile feedback it gives.

The Touchfire is a thin, clear plastic flexible film, with raised button pads to correspond with the onscreen keyboard underneath. (It may be obvious, but it bears pointing out that the Touchfire only works in landscape mode, but then that’s the only way I type when I use the iPad on a flat surface.) A touch typist will be able to rest his fingers on the home row, but even a hunt-and-peck typist will find their typing speed up.

Sure a real keyboard, like the Apple Bluetooth wireless keyboard or the Logitech keyboard case, will provide a better experience, especially since you don’t lose screen real estate to the onscreen keyboard with them, with the Touchfire you don’t have to worry about batteries or Bluetooth pairing.

Touchfire also has a nice website for new users to help provide some training and familiarization as you get used to it. By the end of the training, I was up to 120 words per minute.

At $50, it’s not a cheap accessory, but if you’re looking for an iPad keyboard that adds little to no bulk, it’s a worthy consideration.

Oh, and of course, I typed this review on my iPad using the Touchfire keyboard.

My changing view on Lighthouse Catholic Media

About four years ago I wrote a blog post about a company called Lighthouse Catholic Media. I’d had some difficult dealings with them and carried out a threat to describe the details on my blog if they failed to fix things. In an illustration of the results of search engine optimization, my post ended up as the number one Google search result apart from their own website. I had some further dealings with them, especially with them wanting me to take down the post. I refused, but they eventually fixed things and as I describe in an update to that post today, things have been good in the past four years.

So, I took the step of updating that post to reflect my new attitude toward them. You might ask why I don’t just delete the post? Well, that doesn’t remove the Google link and plus everything lives forever in the Internet archive. At least this way I can provide a new explanation to those who click through.

How my FitBit landed me in the hospital

To be more accurate, the title should say, “How my FitBit may have landed me in the hospital.” But first, you’ll want to know what a FitBit is.

The FitBit Ultra is one of a couple of health-related gadgets from the company called FitBit. It’s a nifty little gadget that clips to your clothing or drops in your pocket. It keeps track of all your activity—walking, running, stair-climbing, and even sleeping. Then it communicates all this data automatically and wirelessly whenever you’re near your computer.

I’ve been trying to be more active lately, but found it difficult to stay motivated. When the alarm buzzes at 6:15am for my walk before work, it’s sometimes easier to roll over, especially when the kids have kept us awake all night. But playing some online games showed me that winning “achievements” and reaching goals were a good motivator for me and so when I saw the FitBit and it’s system of goals, badges, and accountability Tweets, I thought it would be just the thing.

Now the way it tracks your sleep is that you put a wristband on your non-dominant hand, slip the FitBit inside and set it to sleep mode. Then while you sleep it keeps track of your movements and how often you wake from deep sleep. Now, let’s put a pin in that and come back to it later.

Saturday morning, when I woke up, I noticed my forehead and right front scalp felt numb. I’ve woke up with a numb forehead before, which I attributed to sleeping face down on my pillow or arm, but it always came back within a couple of hours. But this time it didn’t. By early afternoon, I still had no sensation in my scalp and it hadn’t got any better (or worse).

Melanie and I decided that I should call the Nurse’s Helpline that our health insurer provides. She asked me a bunch of questions related to both heart attacks and stroke. (This would be the first of a dozen different times in the next 24 hours I would answer these same questions.) She couldn’t say it was nothing and being a very conservative service, she suggested I call the on-call doctor for my primary care physician. He asked the same questions and said I should go to the Urgent Care center for his practice, which he said would be open until 7pm. (It was about 3:30pm by the time I talked to him.)

So I drove off by myself to the Urgent Care center, which is about 25 minutes south of us. When I got there, it turned out that the place closes at 4pm on the weekends. Thanks, Doc. So off I drove to the local hospital’s emergency room (about 10 minutes north of our house).

After giving my situation to the triage nurse, they immediately brought me back in a wheelchair, which I thought excessive. I saw a nurse, then an attending physician. They sent me for a CAT scan that showed nothing. (Yes, ha ha, they found nothing in my head.) So with the numbness still unexplained they thought there was still a real chance of a stroke, and I should see a neurologist… who would only be available in the morning. Ugh.

At first I was told I would be moved from the ER to a room upstairs in the cardiac monitoring unit, so I was fitted with an IV line and EKG electrodes and hooked to a monitor. Then I proceeded to wait. (My brother came to sit with me for several hours that night, for which I’m grateful.) I tried to read, but was too distracted. So I watched some TV and then tried to sleep, which was nearly impossible with all the talking and beeps and alarms and hullabaloo, not to mention the needle in my arm and wires wrapped about me. In the morning the nurse asked me if I got some sleep. Hah! Who can sleep in a hospital?

I never did get moved to the room upstairs, which meant the electrodes were pointless after all. But the neurologist ordered an MRI. Ugh. I’d heard the horror stories about claustrophobia and they were right. They laid me down on the table, put a cage over my face that touched my nose, put on headphones for music (because of the noise), and told me I wouldn’t be able to move for 45 minutes. They then started sliding me into a tube that would put me about an inch away from the sides.

I’d never thought I was claustrophobic before, but I could feel the panic rising. Perhaps the lack of sleep and anxiety over my still unexplained condition that contributed to the feeling, but whatever it was, I was almost ready to push the eject button and demand to be pulled out when the technician stopped feeding me into the tube. It turns out my shoulders were too wide. Thank God for my stout build! They pulled me out of the device and told me that I’d have to use the larger MRI in the cancer center next door, which was only open during the week. (This was still Sunday.)

They sent me back out to wait for the neurologist to see me and this time I was sent to a private room. While I lay on the stretcher outside the room, waiting for them to make it ready, I was wondering if Melanie would be able to contact our pastor and have him bring me Communion, since I was missing Mass. Wouldn’t you know it, just a few minutes later I see a man walk by holding a gold pyx. I stopped him, by asking “Are you a Eucharistic minister?” He seemed a little surprised, but said Yes, so I said I would love to be able to receive Communion. The Lord provides.

Finally,I saw the neurologist and we had a good conversation. He did the same tests—touch your nose, follow my pen, squeeze my hand, although pull my finger was new (and smelly); Ba dum bump! I’ll be here all week, tip your waiter—and then suggested that I pinched a nerve. There’s a one nerve cluster that controls sensation in the area of the skull that went numb and we agreed I must have slept on it funny. Then he suggested I do a sleep apnea study and I mentioned how the FitBit measures my sleep pattern and started to explain it: “I wear the wristband on my non-dominant hand and put the device inside…”

He interrupted me and said that must be it! The nerve cluster begins in the forehead right about where I sleep with my head on right wrist at night. I must have slept on the FitBit where it pressed on the nerve ending all night, causing it to go dead.

No stroke. No aneurysm. No Bell’s palsy. No heart attack. No, I just spent about 24 hours in the hospital because I slept on my new gadget the wrong way.

Good grief.

So here I am, home again. At least I didn’t have to endure the MRI after all and now I’v e had a full workup of my heart’s health. And while I didn’t wear the FitBit last night, I think there’s a way to wear it at night without turning me into a numbskull. And even if I don’t wear it at night, it’s still useful for everything else it does.

But if you’re a FitBit Ultra owner who sleeps on his belly, beware of the possible consequences. Here’s hoping the feeling returns to my scalp because at this point it’s coming back, although slowly.

Better safe than sorry, though, right?

Photo by pixieclipx – http://flic.kr/p/u7Kty

The real secret to making money in new media

I often see tweets and status updates linking to blog posts from famed marketing and social media gurus touting the top 10 ways to make money from your blog or podcast or Twitter feed as if these were arcane secrets teased out of the Internet and shared begrudgingly with anyone willing to make the hit counter on the guru’s site spin.

The reality is that there are two requirements if your goal is to make money from your new media project: Work hard and be talented.

That’s it. Okay, I’ll expand a little.

It’s like the rest of life. There aren’t shortcuts. You can’t become a millionaire in four hours a week. Yes, I know about that one guy with the book and all that, but he’s a fluke. That’s not the real world.

If you want a lot of readers for your blog or listeners/viewers for your podcast, you have to work hard. Not work hard at artificial number inflation or stupid search-engine gimmicks or social media trawling. I mean work hard by writing a lot, by creating a lot.

You need to have something interesting to say. You need to be consistent in your publishing. Don’t be annoying. Don’t get anxious about numbers. If your stuff is worthy, people will find you.

But it’s not enough to spew words onto the page or sounds into a recorder. It has to be good. This is the tricky part. Quality is king; mere quantity isn’t enough.

Talent is innate. It’s God-given, although raw talent can’t do it on its own. Skill is learned and practiced. It must be honed. Combine skill and talent and you have a winning formula. Add in hard work and passion and you have success. This isn’t just true of success in new media. This is success in anything.

It seems so simple. So why all the other folderol of “the secret to success” being peddled everywhere? First, because nobody likes to work hard so if there’s a shortcut to be found, they want it. Second, because not everyone has talent. I’m sorry to break the news to everyone in the self-esteem generation, but it’s true. For many people, no matter how hard you work, how much time you spend working on skills, you just don’t have what it takes to be a success in this area.

So move on. Find your talent and succeed there. Your road to fulfillment leads elsewhere.

I’m no self-help guru and this isn’t just about new media. It also seems like commonsense to me, but judging by what I see a lot of people posting, it’s not.

Good luck.

Favorite Mac OS X Apps of 2011

At the end of every year there is inevitable cavalcade of articles and posts listing “The Year’s Best of X”, where X is some category of stuff. At the risk of adding to the noise of such writing, I have been inspired to catalog my favorite software of 2011 for both Mac OS X and iOS (i.e. iPhones, iPads, and iPod touches.) This post is for OS X apps.

To be clear, this is not a list of my favorite software of all time, just those that I either first acquired this year or were released this year. All of them are apps I continue to use on a regular basis and have become a part of my normal workflow.

Mac OS X Lion and the Mac App Store

Mac OS X Lion Let’s start with the foundation. In 2011, Apple released the latest version of its Mac OS X operating system, 10.7 Lion. There were a number of improvements in Lion that I immediately adopted wherever I could use them, including full-screen applications; Resume, which re-opens the apps you last had open when you restart your Mac and re-opens the documents you last had open when you re-open your apps; Autosave and Versions, which only work in Apple’s own apps so far; Air Drop, that lets you transfer files wirelessly within your network; and so on. Of course, there were some “improvements” that weren’t so welcome, including Launchpad, Mission Control, and the removal of always-visible scroll bars. Among the biggest changes, though, was iCloud, which lets me sync all kinds of data among all my Macs and iOS devices. Likewise iTunes Match is so big, it might merit its own entry on this list. For $25 per year, I get high-quality versions of all my music for streaming and/or downloading on all my devices everywhere: home Mac, work Mac, iPhone, iPad, AppleTV, and so on. I no longer have to remember to synchronize my Christmas music playlist to my phone in December—It’s just there already!

A related piece of software also makes my list this year: the new Mac App Store. For the first time, there is an authoritative place to find and download Mac software, both free and commercial. In fact, much of the software on this list can be found there. The best part of the Mac App Store is that you only need to buy a piece of software once and the license allows you to install it on all your Macs, In addition, all upgrades are done automatically through the App Store. No more wondering if you have the latest version and scouring sites like MacUpdate for updated software. On the other hand, the restrictions Apple imposes on software in the Mac App Store prevent many very useful utilities from being able to be included. However, there’s nothing preventing such software from being downloaded independently of the App Store and installed yourself, so it’s the best of both worlds as long as Apple doesn’t change that ability.

The rest of the list is in no particular order:

Spotify

It’s been a good year for music lovers on the Mac. Before Apple made iTunes Match available, earlier this year Mac users in the US finally got access to Spotify, a service that allows you to listen to any of the millions of songs in their library for free (with a small catch) and even create and share playlists of music with friends, on blogs, and on social networks. The small catch is that the free music is only available on Mac and Windows computers. In order to listen to music on portable devices like iPhones, iPod touches, iPads, Android phones and tablets and more, you have to buy a Spotify subscription for $10 per month. That $10 gives you access to their entire catalog wherever you go, which is nice, but if you stop paying you then lose access to all that music. I prefer to own my music, which is why I don’t have a Spotify subscription. (I buy from iTunes or Amazon MP3.)

Instead, I use Spotify as a preview for music I might want to buy and as a way to discover new music. If I hear of a new artist or song or album, I can listen in Spotify to full tracks, instead of the short previews you get in iTunes or Amazon MP3. You can also see what your Facebook friends are listening to on Spotify as well. One caveat is that like many free services, you have to endure occasional ads. These short audio ads play every fourth song or so.

Piezo

Sticking with our audio theme for a moment, a new app from one of the best Mac software developers around just came out and has already made my list. Piezo by Rogue Amoeba is a simple but elegant audio recording app, so simple in fact that it has two buttons. First, you select your source, whether it’s the Mac’s microphone or one of your apps like the DVD player or QuickTime Player or Spotify. (You might see the implications of this ability right there.) Second, hit record in Piezo and play in the source. Then when it’s done, hit the record button again and you now have a file on your computer. If you want a little more control, you can change what kind of recording it makes, but that’s about all. Now if you have more serious needs like timed recordings or autostart and stop or filters, then you’ll likely want Piezo’s more capable (and more expensive) cousin, Audio Hijack Pro.

Fantastical

On a more productive level, Fantastical from Flexibits has become invaluable for entering and tracking calendar events. The program lives in your menu bar and when it’s called, you start typing your new calendar event in natural language: “Meeting with Joe at Panera on Saturday at 10am.” Fantastical then parses your words and puts each piece in the correct box so that you just have to hit enter and — BAM! — you have a new entry in your calendar. Fantastical supports both iCal and BusyCal (my preferred calendar software) and even shows you a preview of your calendar events for the next couple of days or other period.

Moom

Moom This is a tiny piece of software, but oh, so practical. Moom by Many Tricks hardly has any visible footprint on your Mac until you hover, but don’t click, your cursor over the green zoom button in the window controls of any window on your Mac. A small translucent window pops up that allows you to both move and change the size of the current window. This is especially useful when you have multiple windows open that you want to place so that you can see more than one or copy and paste or something like that. You can either click on one of the preset positions/sizes or choose your own by clicking and dragging over the grid. It may seem a bit pricy at $5 for what it does, but use it for a few days and you’ll begin to think it’s a bargain.

Yoink

Yoink Yoink (where do they come up with these names?) from Eternal Storms is another one-trick pony, but it’s a useful trick. It’s a temporary holding place for files or folders that you’re moving from one place to another. On Windows, you can copy a group of files and paste them elsewhere, but on Mac OS X, you have to drag them, which can be a pain as you navigate several layers of folders while trying not to let go out of the mouse button. With Yoink, you drag the file(s) to the translucent Yoink pad that pops up as soon as you start dragging. Then, once you’ve got the destination folder open, drag them from the Yoink landing pad.

This is much like a particularly useful feature of the massive Finder replacement app, Path Finder, which I used to use but eventually gave up on because it was a bit unwieldy and taxing on the system. Yoink yoinks this nice feature out of Path Finder and makes it stand alone.

ScreenFloat

Also from Eternal Storms is my next pick, ScreenFloat. Often when I’m learning a new Photoshop or web design skill, I follow along with a tutorial I’ve found online. Unfortunately, I will find myself having to keep swapping between programs because their windows are overlapping and Moom won’t help because I need the windows to stay large for some reason. That’s where ScreenFloat comes in. With it I can take screen shots of windows or parts of windows and then have those shots float over everything else. It’s especially useful, for example, with Photoshop dialogs where I have to set many different values to accomplish a particular effect. You can have one or many shots floating at once and the program can store them in collections (say related to a particular task) or smart collections where they are group by rule-based criteria.

Marked

Marked Another small and focused app (detecting a theme?) is Marked from Brett Terpstra. I do most of my writing in TextMate, a powerful text editor, using a markup language called Markdown. Rather than writing and editing everything in HTML, which leaves all kinds of difficult-to-read code and tags to wade through, I use Markdown to write and edit and then when I’m done, I use a command in TextMate to convert to HTML. Thus this …

![Marked](http://cl.ly/CjtE/Marked.jpg “Marked”)Another small and focused app (detecting a theme?) is [Marked](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/marked/id448925439?mt=12) from [Brett Terpstra](http://markedapp.com/). I do most of my writing in [TextMate](http://macromates.com/), a powerful text editor, using a markup language called [Markdown](http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/). Rather than writing and editing everything in HTML, which leaves all kinds of difficult-to-read code and tags to wade through, I use Markdown to write and edit and then when I’m done, I use a command in TextMate to convert to HTML.

… becomes …

<p><img src=“http://cl.ly/CjtE/Marked.jpg” alt=“Marked” title=“Marked” /> Another small and focused app (detecting a theme?) is <a href=“http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/marked/id448925439?mt=12”>Marked</a> from <a href=“http://markedapp.com/”>Brett Terpstra</a>. I do most of my writing in <a href=“http://macromates.com/”>TextMate</a>, a powerful text editor, using a markup language called <a href=“http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/”>Markdown</a>. Rather than writing and editing everything in HTML, which leaves all kinds of difficult-to-read code and tags to wade through, I use Markdown to write and edit and then when I’m done, I use a command in TextMate to convert to HTML.</p>

However, it’s sometimes useful to preview what I’m writing to be sure it’s going to look right. I could convert back and forth between Markdown and HTML and then open it in a browser, but that’s cumbersome. TextMate has a built in previewer, but Marked is better. For one thing, it updates in real-time every time I save my document. For another, I can set up multiple custom CSS stylesheets so that the preview looks like the eventual web page it will post to.

Reeder

Reeder The final entrant on this list is Reeder from Silvio Rizzi. I’ve used RSS readers for years, most faithfully Netnewswire, which in its later incarnation synchronized with Google Reader.

But once I got an iPad, I began using Reeder for iPad, which is the best implementation of an RSS reader that takes advantage of the unique properties of multitouch-based computing. It’s a smooth and intuitive process. So when Reeder for the Mac came out, I wanted to see if that same intuitiveness translated to the Mac, whose own strengths are somewhat different from the iPad. And it did.

The process of moving through feeds and entries and folders is just so easy as is the integration with external services like Instapaper and Evernote and social networks. It’s also been optimized for OS X Lion’s multitouch gestures and full-screen view. And the synchronizing with Google Reader is fast and easy. Well, worth the price.

So that’s my list. I’ve installed other applications and utilities this year, some I continue to use and others that have fallen by the wayside, but these are the standouts. I look forward to seeing what comes next year, but judging by this list, one thing’s for sure: a lot of it will be coming through the Mac App Store.

So what are your favorite Mac apps that came out in 2011?

Facebook friend rejection conundrum

When you reject someone’s friend request, there’s a button for “I don’t even know this creep” or something like that. (I think the actual text is “Do you know Domenic outside of Facebook? Yes or No.”) That seems innocuous enough. No sir, I do not, but I’m sure he’s a fine gentleman of good breeding and impeccable manners. So good of you to ask. It’s just that I’m only accepting new friends that I know personally.

Instead, it turns out that if you click it, the requester gets a heavy-handed warning from Facebook along the lines of: “Look, stalker, we’re the biggest, baddest Internet company in the world and if this button gets pressed on you again, your profile is toast and we’ll shut you out of our loving, happy community of 800 million people….

Oh, and for good measure we just killed all your approved logins in all your web browsers and apps and you will be surprised by how many apps require you to login to your Facebook account to use them. We’re everywhere.”

There’s no indication of how to tell who pushed the button on me nor is there any appeal process or even any further explanation anywhere. The worst part is that there’s no way to see what other friend requests might still be pending or how to cancel them. It’s like a minefield in which someone else steps on the mine and you get killed.

Now, I don’t know whether to cower in fear of losing my Facebook profile or just preemptively kill it myself. (I would just ditch Facebook, but I’m responsible for my job’s Facebook pages and you need a personal profile to maintain them. I’m stuck.)

All I know is that I’ll be darned if I’m going to be friending anyone else for fear of triggering the Facebook goon squad.

Flickr photo by MoneyBlogNews

Strategically re-assessing your parish, diocesan, or ministry website

This one is for those with an interest in website development and management, especially with regard to Catholic parishes, dioceses, or other ministries and non-profits.

A common principle in website management for businesses and organizations is periodic assessment of the site to ensure that it’s meeting strategic goals (you have strategic goals, right?) and that it is up to date with current web standards (for example, no more blink tags or whether to replace Flash with HTML5/CSS3 animations). It’s also important to make sure that it doesn’t feel too dated, i.e. when grunge goes out of style that your site’s theme leaves grunge behind too.

How often should parishes, dioceses, and ministries re-evaluate their sites? I know there are plenty of parish websites who are still rocking the late ’90s with “under construction” animated GIFs, busy backgrounds, and non-CSS, table-based layouts and it’s obviously past time for them. But what about the site we created three years ago, or today for that matter? When should we begin a strategic re-evaluation of it?

My first thought, based on the current pace of change on the web, is that it should be no longer than every 6 years. If you have a site whose design and basic content date to 2005, you should look at whether it’s time to re-design and/or upgrade. With HTML5, CSS3, and today’s advanced standards-compliant web browsers, now is as good a time as ever.

What about a site built today? I think in six years, the web will have a very different landscape. By then I think mobile platforms—i.e. tablets and phones—will have a very large influence on web design and the web experience. Perhaps mobile apps will be more important as well. Social media is certain to be different. After all, in 2005 Facebook was still limited to college students and MySpace was the big social network. The web moves fast.

So what do you say? How often should a parish, diocese or ministry do a strategic re-evaluation of their website design, content, and goals?

Too Soon

Apple Logo with Steve Jobs silhouette

Gawker.com is a tasteless and vile set of websites. I’ve felt their hateful sting personally. (I’m a big boy, I can take it.) And I’ve seen it wielded against people I know. They are lacking in taste, sensitivity and class.

Steve Jobs was no saint. Anyone who claims otherwise either doesn’t know anything or is kidding themselves. But those of us who posted remembrances over the last few days weren’t just glossing over those parts of his life. We were engaging in something called graciousness. As a society, we used to abide by civilized niceties like not speaking ill of the dead, at least before they’re buried. Remembering the good. The bad will be remembered on its own in time.

Some will say that there is already a sort of hagiography of Jobs being built. They may be more widely read on the subject, but I think I’ve read a fair number of posts and articles and I don’t recall seeing anything that ignored his fallen humanity or that failed to remark upon his remarkable temper and/or arrogance.

I’m curious if any of the folks re-posting Gawker’s tasteless folderol noticed that one of the criticisms they level against Jobs as a defect is that he prevented pornography from appearing in any of his app stores. That’s a virtue in my book, not a vice.

Some claim that Jobs also blocked worthy iOS apps on the basis of having Catholic content. I’m only familiar with one app that was rejected, related to the Manhattan Declaration, which was technically not a “Catholic” app. The declaration is a pan-Christian effort. And I don’t recall any definitive explanation for why it was rejected, just speculations.

Like I said, not speaking ill of the dead before they’re even cold in the grave, to put it bluntly, used to be considered good manners. I’m sorry to see how many self-appointed cold-water-throwing truth-revealers choose to ignore it by getting in bed with the lowest sort of “journalists”. And I found the Gawker article to be anything but balanced, relying as it does on assertions without accompanying data.

Steve Jobs was a hard and driven man who sought perfection in himself and others and sometimes he wasn’t “nice”. Well, excuse me if “nice” isn’t on my list of top 10 personal qualities. Plenty of the best people and most accomplished people were criticized for not being “nice”.

Again, I know he wasn’t a saint. He was an immensely talented man who had a vision that he pursued and he changed the world doing it. Consider the device you’re reading this on. Without Steve Jobs it would be immeasurably less easy to use and probably much buggier.

In 30 years, we’ve gone from computers the size of refrigerators that you interacted with via white letter on black background text-only screens to computers that fit in your pocket, that can connect to nearly the totality of human knowledge, and can now respond to natural language commands to accomplish all sorts of tasks. Steve Jobs didn’t take us from point A to point B by himself, but it’s safe to say that without him we’d be a lot further away from point B than we are today. Point B wouldn’t even be a dot on the horizon, in fact.

Gawker’s stock in trade is classless contrarianism and controversy. Some say Gawker might have done us a service despite itself, in exposing the scandal of the working conditions of the Chinese factories that build Apple products. Even there I don’t think it’s a criminal scandal deserving of special exception to the rules of civilized discourse, in that Apple has already taken steps to address problems with the subcontractor responsible, including moving some manufacturing to Brazil. Not to mention the issue of working conditions in China is an issue for all American industry, not just one and it’s a bit unfair to single out Apple as the bad guy. As a shareholder and a fan of the products, I have kept up with this issue and they have responded to criticisms of working conditions.

Jeff Miller offered the following cogent thought on Google+:

I try to follow Chesterton’s approach in that he can see both the good and the bad. He could applaud and critique the ideas of his friends such as H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw while remaining their friends. Usually what we find though in the case of the world of ideas is that not only are the ideas attacked, but the person themselves is to be personally attacked. This always moves a response to idea into something more hateful which does not serve the cause of projecting the response forward. Modern politics is full of this. We are not allowed to applaud anybodies accomplishments if they had personal flaws. Columbus Day being a case in point. Rather we should be doing a both/and of acknowledging what is good and not minimizing what is bad.

Those who link to and re-post Gawker’s manipulative and often factually suspect drivel ought to think twice about it.

Photo by Lightsurgery – http://flic.kr/p/atjiVp

Steve Jobs, 1955-2011

SteveJobsRIP

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

This statement from Apple’s “Think Different” campaign was originally applied to the great minds of the the 20th century, artists, scientists, entertainers, thinkers, and peacemakers. But it could also be said to apply to Steve Jobs.

I’m not going to write a hagiography of Jobs here or canonize him. I’m sure he was flawed and had his failings. But you can’t deny that he’s changed the world as we know it. In the past 30 years, he has completely changed four major industries: computers, telephones, music, and animated movies. And his influence has extended deeply into dozens of others.

Seven years ago, I wrote about the Apple computers that I’ve owned and used over the years and I’ve only gone deeper and deeper into the Apple ecosystem since then.

I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that Steve Jobs has had more day-to-day influence on my life than anyone outside my family. It’s hard to say goodbye to him today. Something that Steve Jobs created through his incredible vision is never more than a couple of feet away from me at all times. And those amazing devices connect me to a world of information, entertainment, and more importantly, community that I could only imagine as science fiction just a few years ago. He will be sorely missed.

I would add, like I did at the CNMC, that Steve Jobs taught a lesson to Catholic communicators that we should stop selling toothpaste and instead sell clean teeth. Rather than trying to convince people of particular doctrines and dogmas, we need to show people how a relationship with Jesus Christ changes and improves your life.

I would say that some of the grief I feel today is for the man, Steve Jobs, and his family, but I didn’t really know him in those terms. To be honest, I think the greater emotion I feel is the uncertainty I feel for the future of the company he founded and the industries he’s shaped.

May Steve Jobs rest in peace.

At the CNMC

KansasCity

This weekend I’m at the Catholic New Media Conference in Kansas City, KS, as part of my work as Creative Director of Pilot New Media in the Archdiocese of Boston. We hosted the conference at the Pastoral Center in Braintree last year and it was such a great opportunity to connect with people in the same field that both I and my boss Scot Landry came out for this one too.

We’re at the Savior Pastoral Center of the Archdiocese of Kansas City. In addition to their archdiocesan offices, this former minor seminary also has a retreat center, which is a great convenience and they’re very nice rooms to boot.

I got in late last night. My flight out of Boston was delayed due to weather and after arriving in Kansas City, MO, across the river, I drove her in my rental car and was finally in my room by about 11:30pm local time. I was still keyed up from travel so didn’t get to bed about 2:30am, which would be worse if I wasn’t regularly getting such little sleep from our children waking me up in the night.

The program hasn’t started yet. Today is a series of practical workshops on new media in parishes and ministries. I think I’ll find inspiration and ideas for my own work with parishes and ministries back home. That all starts at 1pm.

Tomorrow is the main conference with a series of keynote speakers and breakout sessions.

I’ve already had a chance for some great conversation with folks here over a long breakfast after Mass this morning. To me, that’s the best part of these gatherings.

If you’d like to follow along, you can follow the hashtag #cnmc11 on Twitter. (Tweetchat is a great tool for that.) You can also see live streaming of some of the presentations at the SQPN site. Photos will be posted to the CNMC11 Flickr group. And of course, check the usual social networks: Facebook and Google+.

I hope to offer updates here as I can, but I’ll be posting at least on the social networks.

Photo by jennywetz – http://flic.kr/p/aqkv3K