Ask anyone that knows me and they'll say I'm an Apple fanboy. For those of you not familiar with the term, Apple fanboy refers to an individual who thinks, most of the time, that Apple can do no wrong. That they make the best computers and devices. That their OS versions both on the Mac and iOS are the best you can get.

People that think of me as an Apple fanboy are thinking of me the wrong way. You see, I'm not a blind Apple fan. I'm a fan of the best. And up to this point, Apple has been the best. You can't argue with their hardware design. You can't argue with the customer experience that they give in their stores. You can't argue against OSX, small in marketshare but incredibly meaningful desktop operating system that surpasses Windows in design, usability, stability and performance. Not in compatibility, mind you, especially with Office, but you get the point. 

So it may come as a surprise to you that I would be writing an article that's critical of Apple today. 

Because, in my opinion, Apple no longer has the best mobile operating system. 

It has been a long road with iOS. One that didn't have many curves and dips, but it certainly has had its detours. I had the original iPhone in 2007, sans App Store. That's right - no multitasking, no copy and paste, and no App Store. The App Store, released a year after the original iPhone with the iPhone 3G, was revolutionary and set the precedent for all impostors to follow. 

While iOS (then called iPhone OS) looked revolutionary in 2007, and it certainly was, now it just looks dated. The grid of icons is old. The lack of widgets and other dynamic icons is just wrong. While I understand the reasons why Apple has stayed with the same basic design (the only redesign coming with last year's iOS 7), I don't agree with them. Apple wants the pure, simple experience for customers, and if you look at some of the Android fragmentation out there, you might say they're definitely doing the right thing. But now I'm not so sure. 

I had my yearly flirt with Android a couple of weeks ago. This time I decided to take a dive off the deep end and get a mobile phone instead of just another 7-inch tablet. I wanted to know how long it would last, and if I would stick with the device in pocket being on Android or if I would crawl my way back to my iPhone in shame. I decided on the Moto X. 

Let's back up before I talk about my latest Android experience and talk about my first. In early 2011, I actually won a Samsung Galaxy Tab (7-inch, 1st-gen model) in a contest. The experience was terrible. It was running Android 2.2. It was still called the Android Market back then. App purchases were clunky and had to be routed through Paypal. The UI on the device itself was abysmal. It wasn't a bad form factor though, and I sincerely hoped Apple would have a 7-inch tablet soon. I sold it only after a few months. 

My second foray into Android lasted only 12 hours. My cell contract was up, it was time to upgrade from my iPhone 4 where the Home button no longer worked, and I was in love with the Galaxy S3. So I got one. The next day I took it back and ordered an iPhone 5. There wasn't anything neccessarily bad about the S3, it was just not iOS. And that bothered me severely, because I had purchased apps that were iOS-exclusive that I loved. 

So back to a few weeks ago, I found out that you can, in fact, purchase any phone you wanted to provided it worked on your specific network and activate it with no charge. So I found a great price on a Moto X and met the guy and bought it. And I loved it. 

I loved the active notifications on the screen. I loved the fact that all I had to do was take it out of my pocket and it would show me the timw without pushing buttons. I loved the bigger screen, even though it wasn't 1080p. I loved the curved back on the phone, so unlike the designs of the iPhone in recent years. Most of all, I loved the fact that almost every single app I used on iOS now had a Android counterpart. 

There was only one problem: nearly everyone I know is on iOS. 

And that causes problems. iMessage for one. iMessage never worked correctly while I was using the Moto X. It would still forward Messages sent to me to my iPhone if it was on WiFi. Even after deactivating my devices on Apple.com, disconnecting each of them in Settings, it still didn't solve the problem. 

Ordinarily, I would tell people to just get over it and get used to me being off iMessage and on Android. But that's complex when you're a youth minister and all your kids are on iOS. And their parents. 

And, oddly enough, I found that working with text on the Moto X (and in turn, Android) was frustrating. I work with lots of text. I transfer lots of text. I take lots of notes on everything. So being able to copy and paste and place words in sentences was really important. And it was just clunky on Android, even running 4.4 KItKat. 

So the tension mounted, and I crawled back to my iPhone. And I'm not happy. 

If you look at how far Android has come since its introduction in 2008 (let alone just the last few years), you'll be astounded. It's like you're not looking at the same OS. iOS, on the other hand, looks almost the same. Sure, there's under-the-hood changes, and iOS 7 introduced some useful new features, but it isn't stable. It crashes with me, on average, twice a day. The UI choices in iOS 7 (like text-borderless buttons) leave something to be desired. And some of the icons look awful. 

What I would love is a fusion of the two. The cleaness of iOS (which Android has really nicely gotten clean on Nexus devices), and the flexibility and openness of Android to run things like widgets, skins, and other stuff. 

Maybe this is just me lamenting a first-world problem with a mobile phone OS that I use every day. Maybe it's time for Apple to change direction and introduce some really snazzy stuff in the next iteration of iOS. Because right now, I think Android has a leg up in choice, overall usability, and customization. If those things are important to you, you might want to take a long look at Android before you stay on the road with iOS. 

Ten or fifteen years ago, you could have gotten away with not backing up your computer. Digital photos and great smartphone cameras we're quite common yet, we still used paper for things, and with the exception of a few things, our lives weren't yet totally on our computers. Fast-forward 15 years, and here we are with portable computers in our pockets. We have thousands upon thousands of digital photos and videos. We communicate through email and messaging. We live on social networks. 

And very few of us back all that data up. 

One out of every two computer users (which is pretty much everyone) will have a negative computer event in their lives every year. That could mean a computer crashing, a hard drive failing, or some natural disaster like flood or fire taking out your digital devices. 

The cardinal rule with backups is three backups on every machine - two on-site and one off. That means you need to have a backup, a backup for your backup, and an off-site backup (either on another HD at another physical location or through a service online like Crashplan). 

But most of us won't do it, because we're too busy to do it and too lazy to figure it out. And one day, it will cost you. 

Don't let 2014 be the year that you lost everything. 

With the cheapness of hard drives these days (even ultra-fast Solid State Drives are coming way down in price) you can get a lot of storage for not a lot of money. 

First, identify your needs. If you're a grandparent and have a bunch of documents to keep up with, but not a lot of photos or videos, then you probably don't need a Drobo storage array with 10 terabytes of storage. If, on the other hand, you're like me and you have small children and a wife that documents their every move, then you may need a 2 terabyte drive to backup all those photos and videos. Those are things you can't get back. 

Determine the size of your computer and devices. If you have a 500 gigabyte HD on your main laptop or desktop at home, using an external hard drive to store your photos isn't considered a backup. You need those files somewhere else. Make copies of all your important stuff (documents, photos, videos) and have them on a separate HD that you update on a regular basis, like every week. Keep that HD in a waterproof and fireproof safe for extra security. 

Utilize off-site services. All of my documents are stored in Dropbox because I have referred enough people to the service that I have ample storage space for project files, Photoshop documents, Word and Excel files, and other things. I know that my computer could be absolutely destroyed and I could fire up Dropbox on another computer and my files would be there. But I don't ever trust services fully either - I make a copy of my Dropbox folder to an external HD every month on top of my weekly backups. As far as photos and videos, you need a copy of those on an external HD, but you can also utilize services like Flickr and Shutterfly as an off-site backup for your photos and YouTube and Vimeo for videos. One bit of advice on that: don't use new services. Only use services that have been established. You don't want to put all your eggs into one basket and have that service go bankrupt or fail. Just ask users of Everpix what I'm talking about. 

Make it happen. Write it on the calendar, put a note on the fridge - do whatever you have to do to make a regular backup of your computers and devices. Most devices will back up to your computer and then you can, in turn, restore them from that backup. Most HDs offer plug-and-play features to where you can just plug the HD in and it does its thing to make a full backup. And if you can't figure it out, find someone who can or watch a YouTube video about it. 

Again, don't let 2014 be "that year we lost all our family photos." 

Back up. Today. 

Just stop it. 

Everyone does it, so don't pretend that you don't. Even if your password is really good (like 7 letters and 7 random numbers like my go-to password), STOP USING THE SAME PASSWORD FOR EVERYTHING. Here's why. 

If someone were to break into one of your accounts - say, your email - they would literally have access to everything. Bank accounts, credit cards, Amazon, eBay, and then even more stuff like your iCloud or Google Play account, where they could wipe your phone or even your computer. There are two things that you can do today to make it exponentially harder for someone to compromise your digital life. 

1. Use two-factor (or two-step) authentication. Google and Apple both now offer 2FA as a way for you to add an extra layer of security to your accounts. Basically, it works like this: you must have a a device on an account that you physically have access to and when someone unauthorized requests access, you must approve it. Google Authenticator is the app for this (iOS, Google Play) and Apple will let you enable this over Apple.com in your iCloud account. 

2. Use an app. This may be the better and easier solution of the two, and you may not even want to fiddle with 2FA. There are a few apps that allow you to generate and save unique passwords for all your accounts, and keeps them safely encyrpted either on their own servers or on your own Dropbox. The app I love for this is 1Password. Their apps are a little pricey, but so worth it when you think about what you could lose if your accounts are compromised. Right now, for my four main accounts (Google, Apple, Twitter, Facebook) I have four 16-digit random passwords. And 1Password keeps track of all of them with a really great app. All I need to remember is my 1Password Master password and I'm set. LastPass is very good too and does a lot of the same things. Both apps have Safari and Chrome extentions. 

So, in 2014, resolved to NOT use the same passwords for everything. Because if you do, you're asking for lots of trouble. 

One of the disasters in my tech life is photos. Not neccessarily my own, but my wife's. My wife takes at least 15 photos and 3 videos a day of our little son, and that's about to get much worse with the arrival of baby number two in April. My wife loves iPhoto, but with a library approaching 25,000 photos (and topping 75 gigs with videos) iPhoto isn't stable enough to work with. What I've proposed to her (and what I've started using currently) is a three-pronged approach for management and a system for backups. 

The first application I use is Dropbox. Now before you say "I don't have enough room on my Dropbox," listen to me for a second. Dropbox is great for having a backup of important files and access to them on lots of devices, but it's not a repository for big files like photos and videos. Dropbox does have a dandy photo upload feature you can enable within the app (both on Mac and Windows), and you can use that to download your photos from your devices, whether it's an Android phone, iPhone, or SD card from your DSLR. Your photos don't have to stay within your Dropbox folder - in fact, I'd recommend you move them promptly because you'll run out of space fast. 

This photo-upload feature has its advantages. One, you can categorize your photos and videos based on event titles or by day/month in folders. Two, you can pick, choose, delete, and clean out as you import. Three, all your photos go to the same place. Four, you can move photos around easily, and move them to your favorite editing program or social network. 

The Loom Mac app lives in your Menubar. 

The second prong in that management approach for photos is an app called Loom. Loom is relatively new but I've come to love it in the past few months. They have beautiful apps for iPhone and iPad, as well as for the Mac. That being said, the free plan is only 5GB. For me, 5GB is plenty, because I'm not using Loom as a dump app for all my photos. I'm carefully pruning my collections and keeping my most important photos in this app, and so it acts as a backup as well. 

As far as backups are concerned, you still need one (or two) no matter what apps you use. 

I sat in a nice hotel room in Gatlinburg, Tennesee a few years ago while at Polishing the Pulpit consoling my wife because she was trying to clear up space on her Mac and ended up deleting her entire photo library (12,000+ photos at the time). I resolved right then and there that if I wasn't going to organize and manage them, that at least I would have reliable backup. 

The obvious backup is to make a copy on an external hard drive. But that can't be your only backup, because what if something happens in your home like a fire? Or robbery? Thousands of photos - gone. 

What's important is to have an off-site backup. Whether that's on a server, through Amazon S3, all your photos backed up to an app or through Google (or even Facebook - eck!), it's incredibly important to have some redundancy. Hard drives can fail, natural disasters can happen. 

I use Flickr, oddly enough, for my off-site backup. Flickr offeres 1TB (that's right, 1000 gigs) of storage for your photos. They limit you to 200 photos per set though, so plan accordingly. They don't have an iPad, Mac, or PC app yet, but they do have Android and iOS apps that are pretty good. You can make all your albums private so people won't see them, but this is a great way to just dump all your photos in full resolution into a service that tied to Yahoo and probably not going away any time soon. 

There are lots of different ways to manage photos, but one of your tech resolutions for 2014 should be to manage them in a better way. What ways have you used successfully? 

For the last year, I have been looking, searching, researching, trying out, and tweaking what I thought might have been the one solution to my workflow woes. You see, what I want isn't hard - a simple synching solution for me to be able to compose classes and sermons on my computer (or iPad mini) and have them sync to my two other devices. I had some criteria when I began this mission:

1. It must sync to my iPad mini, because I do all my teaching and preaching from it. Additionally, it must look great and I must be able to format it in a way that I can easily glance at my notes when presenting. 

2. It must be on iOS. A companion Mac app would be helpful, but not essential. iPhone app is also not optional as I do a lot of tweaking on the go. 

3. It must be simple. No crazy layouts or unnecessary button on the app - just...simple. 

So, I narrowed my list down to three applications for my workflow: Evernote, Simplenote, and Plain Text. 

 

Evernote

Evernote seems like it's been around a long time, and that's because it has. It is a service that has never been accused of standing still. Evernote continually pushes new designs, additions, and features to its suite of apps which now include Penultimate and Skitch. 

Pros: Evernote is very well designed. The iPad app is beautiful on a retina iPad mini screen (and on the iPad Air as well). The apps are designed to easily do what you want to do: capture anything and everything. Evernote can capture text, pictures, voice memos, and even has embedded To-Do lists. It allows rich-text editing (bold, italics and such). It syncs fast across all devices, has a Mac and Windows app, and is also cross-platform on Android and Windows Phone as well. 

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The Evernote iPad app is gorgeous. 

Cons: For me, it seems a bit too much. I don't often need to capture photos and voice memos, only text. So I end up completely ignoring those features, mostly because I refuse to pay for a premium account ($5/month or $45/year). I did have a premium account for six months and didn't use the features. While it's a great app for 90% of people, a power user like myself who wants simplicity above all else isn't going to be using it very much. Still a great app though. 

Simplenote

Appropriately named, Simplenote is just what it says it is - simple note syncing across devices. I was just about ready to declare this platform dead when Simplenote relaunched with a new web design and app design as well as an introduction of a dedicated Mac app. I really thought this was going to be my solution. 

Pros: Extremely simple and well designed. Fonts and text look great and a retina MacBook Pro and retina iPad mini. The app is active in development and syncs well with other devices. There is no clutter to deal with in these apps - they simply allow you to compose notes, title them, tag them, export them, and pin them to the top of your list. Composing and writing in these apps (as well as the Mac app) is a joy. 

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Simplenote for Mac. 

Cons: It's almost too simple. Simplenote allows no formatting of any type and does not support Markdown editing, so if you want to style your text at all, you are limited to bullet points, numbering, and capitalizations. This sounded great in theory but I've noticed if I can't bold some text or make section headings bigger in my notes then I frequently lose my place while teaching and preaching because all the text looks the same. Tagging is great, and if tagging is your thing, you're going to love this app. If it's not, stay away, because that's the only amount of organization you get from Simplenote. All you have is a long running list of your notes, in order of what was last edited first. There's the option to 'Pin to Top' which comes in very handy.

I've run into some sync issues (as late as Oct-Nov 2013), but most of those seem to have been ironed out. The apps still crash on me frequently (once to twice a week) - I don't think a day or two goes by that the Mac app hasn't quit for no apparent reason and once the iPad app crashed on me while scrolling and preaching in front of hundreds of people (ack!). The iPhone app has a bad bug where it will crash when trying to sort changes in a note. I know developers are active on this app and I love Simplenote, I just cannot afford to use something that's unreliable. If the apps were stable enough, I might have this as my go-to platform. 

Plain Text

And here we are, talking about the joys of plain text once again. I really don't know why I migrated away from plain text, but it seems that my search has brought me full circle, back to where I started. 

You may read this and discount the plain text preference as an uber-nerd thing, but, in fact, it's really not. It just works. 

Pros: You can use a variety of text editors on all devices and plain text formats, including regular ol' .txt, Markdown, or Multi-Markdown. Markdown allows you to style your text how you want without changing to rich-text format. It uses simple symbols like asterisks to indicate bold and italics and hashtags to indicate headlines. Comes in handy when you get it down. The app I love to use on the iPad is Editorial, and on the Mac it's Byword. You can usually sync these apps to Dropbox and keep them in nested folders, easily categorizing what you need where you need it. Apps like Editorial, Nebulous Notes, and Byword are minimalistic and usually offer inline Markdown support, so you can see your bold and italics and headlines while writing. Best of all, plain text is future proof and my files are not tied to any platform, so I can move them around as I please. 

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Editorial for iPad. 

Cons: No simple "Compose it and forget it" syncing. Syncing is pretty painless, but requires a little bit of file management as well. Syncing isn't instantaneous unless you save your files in the app you're using. So unlike Simplenote and Evernote, you can't just sync and go. Plain text may not appeal to many people because it's not as simple to set up as other services. There's an extra added step when syncing to Dropbox, and you must know where your text repository folder is located. 

So looking at these three platforms, jumping back and forth between using them for the last year, I realized that there really is no "one solution" for capturing all my thoughts, pictures, and text (long or short). One solution is finding a small, precise suite of apps that fit your purposes. I'll use Editorial and Byword for all my writing (70% of the time), Simplenote for lists and occasional text capture (20% of the time), and Evernote for pics and logs (10% of the time). 

For me at least, one solution ends up being three solutions.