Have you ever been reading a document, book, or handout and said to yourself, "Man, this is some great content. I really want to use it in my next class/sermon/talk, so I guess I'll just have to type it all out into my notes"?  

I have, many times. As preachers and teachers, we are always taking content from commentaries, papers, and other sermons - and if it's not on the internet already or in a Bible program where you can copy and paste, you have to manually type that content out into whatever notes you have, and that can take valuable time away from your study and preparation. 

Enter PDFPen Scan +. This is an app for iOS that enables you to take a picture of any document, book, or text on any page and convert it to text that you can edit, copy, or paste anywhere you want. And it's great at it too.  

PDFPen Scan + uses OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to pull the text out of a PDF. You make a PDF out of the document by simply taking a picture of it with your iDevice. You crop the page to fit, then the document is stored in iCloud and synced to all devices running PDFPen Scan +. Then you can choose to OCR that document - literally pulling the text off the page - and share it via email, text, Dropbox, and many other options. 

I find PDFPen Scan + to be especially helpful with old documents that I have on paper but don't have an actual file of that document. It has really come in handy.  

Unfortunately, there's no trial version available since Apple doesn't do that, but you can PDFPen Scan + for $4.99 in the App Store. That's a small penance to pay for the power of this app.  

Check out the video by David Sparks as well. It gives you a real sense of what this app can do.  

Simplenote is an app that I've loved for a long time, but several design choices like small text on the iPad, unreliable syncing, and too simplistic of a design with mobile apps has made it unusable in my opinion. 

Until now. 

Simplenote, in late August, unveiled a complete redesign of their mobile apps for all platforms, including iOS for iPhone and iPad and also for Android. I've been teaching and preaching from it for the last 30 days exclusively. 

I was very excited about Editorial for iPad, with it's great interface, configureable buttons and layout, customized workflows and Markdown support, and I had purchased it and began using it when the new Simplenote came out. Needless to say, I was impressed. 

For the longest time, my workflow included plain text editing with Elements on iPad and iPhone, syncing with Dropbox, and I would actually preach and teach from within Elements. But Elements, at least for me, started getting buggy, even with regular updates. (I'm sure it's been fixed, but 1 or 2 crashes while I am speaking to 300+ people is 1 or 2 times too many.)  So I stopped using it and turned to Nebulous Notes.

While syncing with Dropbox offered some flexibility (like seamlessly offering my lessons as .txt files for download on my website, copying and moving files, and making backups easy), I found that it was a few too many steps. I would compose a text file in my Mac text editor of choice (usually Textastic), save it as either a .txt or .md file if I wanted limited styling, make sure it was in the correct folder in Dropbox, then search for that file under my Elements directory to pull it up on my iPad for teaching. 

With Simplenote, I write my lesson in the Simplenote app for Mac (which is incredibly nice by the way), and my changes are automatically pushed to my devices. All I need to do is load the app on the iPad and whoosh - it's there. And syncing with SImplenote is incredibly fast. 

Another thing that helps is local note caching. All my notes once synced will be available for edit and viewing whether connected to a network or not. I've had lots of speaking engagements where there is no connection whatsoever - even through a cell network - and my notes, provided I synced before I left, are there. No having to worry whether or not that 7th revision to my sermon synced to the correct folder and file in Dropbox. Dropbox doesn't append the file (unless you're using specific programs), it re-uploads the entire file if one letter is changed. I know text files aren't that big to begin with, but when you're out in the middle of nowhere with little or no data connection, every byte is hard to come by. 

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Simplenote Mac app. Click for larger. 

I mentioned it before, but what helped push me over the edge was the Mac desktop app for Simplenote. You can see for yourself that Simplenote really lives up to its name with its very spartan and minimalist interface. The changes are almost instant - I can type and sentence on the desktop and watch it be pushed to the iPad app seconds later. It's great. 

I love Editorial, plain text, and Markdown, but to tell you the truth, I don't need any of that. All I need is text, and the new redesigns for the mobile apps make the fonts much easier to read and far better to compose in. And if a worst-case scenario happens and I lose all my devices, including my Mac, my notes are all backed up on Simplenote servers. I can log on to simplenote.com and edit and back up my notes from there. 

If you're looking for a simple, elegant solution and don't want all the fuss with saving file and formatting, look no further than Simplenote. It's free and it's wonderful. What do you have to lose?

Been getting a lot of questions about simple features in iOS 7. Thought I would make a little video. Enjoy and share.

This may be cooler looking than iOS 7.  

From Chris Harrison:  

The bar graph that runs along the bottom represents all of the chapters in the Bible. Books alternate in color between white and light gray. The length of each bar denotes the number of verses in the chapter. Each of the 63,779 cross references found in the Bible is depicted by a single arc - the color corresponds to the distance between the two chapters, creating a rainbow-like effect.

Too cool. Gonna frame it and put it in my office.  

You can visit Chris' site and get the original in super-hi res if you want.  

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iOS 6 on the right, iOS 7 on the left. 

I'm not into market research, sales numbers, or even demographics when it comes to technology. But I can tell you one thing: when iOS 7 rolls out today, it may be the most popular and most widely adopted iOS upgrade to date.  

Why? Because of kids. I have had more kids ask me, "When is iOS 7 coming out?" than you'd ever believe. Keep in mind, this is an OS upgrade. We're not talking about a new video game or a huge concert - this is an OS upgrade on a phone.  

Right now, on the record, I predict that iOS 7 will be the most popular upgrade Apple has pushed out. Ever. And it will be on over 80% of all capable iOS devices in less than a week. 

Watch out, Apple, your servers are about to get hammered.  

iOS 7 will roll out across time zones (like every other iOS upgrade) gradually today. People in Central and Eastern can expect to get the update some time this afternoon.