Squarespace today introduced their new version of their content management system. I'm composing this new post in it, and while different, I must say that it is fantastic. I manage lots of sites on Squarespace and this will help me a lot.

From Squarespace themselves:

Squarespace 7 is the result of a year-long effort to refine the simplicity of our platform while retaining its power. The biggest change you’ll notice is in our interface; you can now make live edits in your website without switching back and forth between preview mode and your Website Manager, and we've annotated every editable element on your site to make everything easier than ever. We've also reorganized our menus to create a more intuitive experience overall.

We’ve made great efforts to solve some real pain points for anyone that’s building a website. Often, a great website relies on great imagery – with our new Getty Images integration, you now have access to tens of millions of premium creative and editorial images, all starting at $10 per image. For those of you who want personalized email, you can sign up for Gmail for Work and other Google Apps features right within Squarespace (starting at just $5/user per month). When you don’t necessarily need a full-fledged website for your idea, you can use our Cover Pages tool to create a beautiful landing page.

The new platform will be available to groups of existing Squarespace customers starting today in a controlled public beta format.

For more information, including how to gain access to Squarespace 7, please visit our launch site at www.squarespace.com/seven. For specific questions, see our Squarespace 7 FAQ www.squarespace.com/seven/faq.

To find SS7, just look for 'Squarespace 7' under your Settings tab and enable it. Squarespace promises that you can go back if you don't like it, but I doubt you won't. 

If you're looking for a great website building, I can't recommend Squarespace enough. It's less than $100 a year for a great website that will function on anything and look great on mobile devices. And as you can see, they keep making their platform better and better. 

Email me at chad.landman@gmail.com and ask any questions about it you want. I would love to help you find a web solution for your church, business, or organization. 

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The supposed 4.7- and 5.5-inch iPhone 6 to be announced next week. Source

If the overwhelming rumors hold true, Apple will announce not one, but two new iPhones next week at their special event in California: an newly-designed iPhone 6, one with a 4.7-inch display and one with a 5.5-inch display.

If you take a ruler to your current iPhone, it's just 4 inches diagonally. Now expand that out to 4.7 and 5.5 inches. You'll see that the 5.5-inch phone is much bigger. You get a whole lot more screen real estate with 5.5 inches.

Which brings up an interesting question - if you use an iPad mini to preach from, would you consider using a 5.5-inch iPhone to do the same thing?

I would. And I'm planning to. And here's why.

1) One device, not two. Right now I have the trifecta - the iPhone, iPad mini and my Macbook Pro. But I would love to trim that down to just two devices - my iPhone and Macbook. I use the three devices I have now for very different things. I use the phone for taking pictures, checking Twitter, taking down quick notes, and oh - texting and talking on the phone. I use the iPad mini to preach from, and I've found myself not using the iPad mini as much as I've wanted to. I surf the web and read a lot on my laptop versus my iPad. I write and watch videos on my laptop. I'm not much of a digital reader so I don't use the iPad for that (plus I do most of my reading right before bed, and they say that looking at screens before bed leads to sleep problems).

2) It won't be a 'blown-up' iPhone. Apple wouldn't do that (or at least I hope they wouldn't). They didn't just blow up iOS to fit on an iPad, they made a different interface for it. The 5.5-inch iPhone, whether it comes out 10 days after the announcement or not until 2015, will have a different kind of OS. In my opinion, it will still run on iOS of course, but it will be some kind of hybrid between iPad and iPhone views. Don't ask me to explain all of that, I just think that's what Apple will do with it.

3) The resolution will be crazy high. And that will lead to great looking text - at any size. Whether you're looking at Evernote, Simplenote, or a PDF in Goodreader, it's going to look fantastic. Text will be able to be resized to whatever you want it to be.

Are there trade-offs to a huge iPhone? Why sure. For one, you look wacky with the thing on your ear talking on the phone. Like holding small Bible to your head. Another thing would be how portable it is - will it fit in your pocket?

But to me, having one device that has everything I need and is big enough so that I can preach and teach from it will be invaluable to me.

What do you think? Sound off in the comments.

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It's always cool to see other people's home screens - it's like peering into their living room. So I present my current home screen. What I'm using and how I'm using it. 

First of all, I don't have folders on my home screen. Why? I think a home screen should be reserved for those apps that one uses every day. I want to get to the info or app when I want to as fast as possible. 

Starting with the dock, I use a three-app setup for the apps I use the most: Silo, Calendars 5, and OneNote. 

Silo is an excellent To-Do list app and has a native iPad and Mac app as well, which is essential for me. You can make multiple lists and Silo's signature feature is sharing those lists. This app is great for task management within groups. 

I've raved about Calendars 5 from Readdle. Lots of people love Fantastical, but I prefer Calendars 5 because it just works best for what I need. I need to see a month a time in meetings and talking to people about scheduling, and I need to do it quickly. C5 offers that and a very quick entry of new events into my calendar. 

OneNote has become my default app for everything. I love the design, I love the updated iOS apps, and I love how it handles documents to and from devices (it maintains layouts and fonts across all platforms). It's a great project management tool - not just for notes. 

Back up to the top, I use the Ascend Federal Credit Union app to keep track of my bank account. It's a small local bank here in Tennessee but have just added mobile check deposits through the apps. Nice. 

I use the standard Apple Maps app because it has pretty good integration with iOS. The Weather Channel is also pretty standard, but their recent iOS 7 update made it way more like Yahoo Weather, except with the accuracy of The Weather Channel. 

Scanbot has become a new favorite of mine for scanning documents with my phone, which is surprisingly great. You would think that would be cumbersome, but it's not. 

Tweetbot is my Twitter client of choice. It is magnitudes better than the standard Twitter app. I love the user muting feature - comes in handy when you've got those people that you follow that tweeting just a little too much. 

Paper has actually made me like Facebook again. It's a real pioneering app that uses "sloppy swiping" to navigate. It works really well and I like this Facebook app a lot better. 

Reeder is my RSS reader of choice, and I sync through Feedly. I don't have a ton of feeds, but it's nice and handy when standing in the checkout line and you can quickly skim your feeds. 

Dropbox is a staple. While I don't have as much storage space on DB as I do with Google Drive or Box, I still find it more useful and less irritating than other services. 

Mailbox is my favorite email client on iOS. It's basically email triage. I talked about this app on episode 16 of Ministry Bits. I have it set to display a numbered notification badge on the app if there's messages in there, so for me it's almost like a task list, because I know if I see a badge there that I need to act on something. I hear there's also a Mac app in the works as well. 

1Password is probably my most essential app. While not cheap, I know that my passwords are secure and every one of them is unique and very difficult to break because I have this app. You have a master password to unlock the app, and then you can copy any of those password into other apps or other sites using the built-in and very capable browser. 

Pedometer++ is great for tracking your steps every day. It's simple and effective. 

Instacast is my podcast catcher of choice. It's great, and I use it on iPad as well. You can subscribe to podcasts directly within the app, and download podcasts for later viewing. 

The ESV Bible is the simplest Bible app out there, and it's the version I prefer. 

Evernote I mainly use for taking pictures and scanning business cards, all of which are searchable. Evernote can be used for lots of things, but that's what I use it for. 

Last but not least, Day One is a journaling app that I use to keep track of what I've done - as a youth minister I need accountability, and I log every event from phone calls to conversations I've had to ball games I go to. It comes in handy if I ever need to remember what I did on a particular day. 

So that's it! Let me know if you would like YOUR home screen featured on the site. We'd love to see your home screen!

I have actively struggled with how to take notes. From organizing them in nested folders in plaintext and markdown documents to throwing everything I digitally collect into Evernote, I have never been really happy. 

Microsoft's OneNote made a splash last week when the company released the Mac app (on the Mac App Store no less), and reduced the price to free. I've heard a lot about OneNote and loved the iPhone app, but without a companion Mac app, it was dead to me. 

I've been using the Mac app, along with the iPad and iPhone app for over a week now, and I am truly impressed. 

First, it's a Microsoft product. I didn't know that the boys from Redmond could make quality and stable apps on the Mac. Usually you got one or the other: it was great but not stable, or it was stable but not great. OneNote is both. 

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OneNote for Mac

I plan to do some comparing and contrasting of OneNote versus other note-taking platforms in the coming weeks, but I can faithfully say that I've found what I'm looking for. 

Why do I like it, you say?

1. It's pretty. I know that doesn't matter to some people as long as it's not ugly and it's great at what it does, but it matters to me. A lot. In OneNote, you can add notebooks, which go down into tabs that you can color any way you want. Then those tabs can be further subdivided into pages in that tab. Microsoft's stamp is all over the product and it should be - from Calibri font to the famed "ribbon" for formatting at the top. What's weird is that after kicking Office to the curb six years ago, all this doesn't bother me one bit. I will use whatever I deem is the best for me, no matter what company makes it. 

2. It does everything Evernote does. From a basic functionality standpoint, OneNote does everything Evernote does for me. It just does it a bit better. I never bought into the tagging system - even with multiple tags on one note, I still didn't feel like everything was organized. With OneNote, everything is categorized into your tabs and then subdivided into your pages if you wish. OneNote is also pretty great in the fact that it lets you type anywhere on the document open, almost giving you a canvas feel to the thing. I can put blocks of text, to-do lists, pictures, and anything else I want to - anywhere I want to. 

3. OneNote interfaces with Office much better. If I was an Office user, I would be absolutely giddy over OneNote. It would be a major thing for me. As it stands, I'm not, but OneNote is still a great standalone app for me. It collects everything I need it to, and it syncs to my devices for later use. I can configure what I need to and drop whatever I need to in it. And it will be organized where I want it. 

You should give OneNote a try, on the Mac or PC. There are obvious advantages to using OneNote on Windows, and for the low price of free, you can't lose by trying it out. I hear that the Windows Phone app is pretty swell also. 

Bottom line: don't change your notes system if it's working for you. Just like the Bible says though: "Test everything." Doesn't mean you have to change your whole process, but it might be a good thing for you to do. 

One of the things God has blessed me with was the ability to know stuff about technology that most other people don't know. I don't say this because I'm an expert (because I'm not), I say this because every day I come across someone who surprises me with either their knowledge or lack thereof about technology.

I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the Youth Ministry Workshop at the Freed-Hardeman Lectureships this past week - and I was on the other side of the table. I know a lot of stuff about technology - maybe too much. But I learned about new ways of doing things, new apps, new ways to create apps - stuff I had literally never heard before. 

So my new podcast I (re)started about 2 weeks ago is just that. It's about technology - both the tools we can use and the lessons we can learn from it in ministry. It's called Ministry Bits, and you don't have to go too far to listen. 

There are lots of people in the ministry that you and I know that are good at a lot of different things. Some are good at graphics. Some are good at using technology to preach and teach. So how can we use their knowledge to make our ministries better? We can see how they did it. 

If we want to be like Christ, we need to do the things he did. If we want to use technology effectively in our ministries, then we need to do the things that effective people do. 

Ministry Bits is an attempt to cobble together all this knowledge into one weekly podcast, so that everyone can listen and benefit. We will have guests in the coming weeks talk about perspectives on technology in ministry, reading, writing, and teaching and preaching in ministry. I hope that you the listener will benefit greatly from their knowledge and experience. We'll have shows on apps, workflows, and gadgets to use in ministry. 

Thank you in advance for supporting the new podcast. It's going to be a great ride. 

You can check out Ministry Bits right here on the website, or you can subscribe with iTunes in your favorite podcast client for easy listening. Shows run 25-30 minutes, no more. Your time is valuable. If you have a request, a comment, or would even like to be on the show, give me a shout at chad.landman@gmail.com.