In the next few days you may notice some amazing, cool, bizarre, or just plain freaky stuff happening to my blog.
THIS IS PERFECTLY NORMAL (or at least until Friday).
My blog has not been hacked, cracked, or jacked. No. Instead, I’m beta-testing the coveted, brand-spanking new Standard 3.
As a blogger, you’ve got to learn to dabble in a few different areas to maintain a somewhat successful blog. WordPress, code, photo editors, and of course, social media sites.
Since I manage a couple of blogs and sites, I am always looking for “tools” that will help me work smarter, not harder. One that has caught my attention lately is CameraBag 2 – “desktop photo editing redefined.”
[click here is you can't see the video]
Pretty cool eh!
The desktop app is currently on sale at 25% off in the Mac App Store. I think it’s worth the $17. But if you don’t believe me, here are some of my own shots using CameraBag 2 (and they literally took a few seconds to edit):
This one's the original image.
Isn’t my wife HAWT?!!!!
Reminds me of the Japanese flag 
So as you can see, it’s really easy to get completely different results. Grab it the app here.
A few weeks ago I was at a conference and during worship there were these incredible videos that accompanied a few of the songs. I thought that the video guys had pulled an all-nighter and created them.
That wasn’t the case (thanks for your honesty Matt ).
I learned that they simply used Flexx videos. Here’s the basic idea: instead of a song having 4 slides for lyrics (verse 1, chorus, verse 2, bridge), you have 4 short videos containing the lyrics that would have been the 4 slides.
In my opinion, the best way for you to understand it is to actually try it. You will see that it can quickly and easily take your visual worship experience to a whole new level. Although I wouldn’t use it for every song, Flexx videos can effectively be used to visually represent what we are singing about and highlight a specific theme in a song.
Have a look at some of these Flexx videos from Worship House Media.
Watch this tutorial to learn a little more about how Flexx videos work.
March was an extremely busy month. Not only did I start at a new church but I renovated my office (painted it and learned how to install hardwood flooring) and had to start commuting with/into Toronto traffic.
Along with all this, I’m learning what it means to be an associate pastor and to also oversee the worship and young adult ministries.
Those who know me know that I love technology and that I like to find ways to use it to make work and life much easier. Lately I’ve been playing with a few new tools that I wanted to share with you.
When I turned the big Three-0 back in December, I received a boatload of Apple gift cards for the express purpose of purchasing my first iPad. Being the Apple geek that I am, I asked for gift cards so I could wait for the new iPad. So as you would know, I picked up the New iPad a day after its release.
This past Sunday I prepared to preach from my notes on my iPad. However, being a little cautious, I also printed my notes out. When the time came to put it to the test, out of habit, I placed the printed notes over my iPad and began to preach – never to look at my iPad again until I was done.
Did my plan fail? Yes, but I will get there one day. I am loving the possibilities that my iPad affords and I am just skimming the surface.
Here are some apps that I am loving for worship/ministry purposes: Planning Center Online, SoundCue, GarageBand, Pages and Evernote.
Because so many of my friends already have been using Planning Center for so many year, I feel like a loser revealing that I’m only starting to dig into it now, but I am so happy that I started. We are currently using the free plan (good for up to 10 volunteers and 1 plan) to explore a little and I know for a fact (when the budget gets approved) that we will be moving to a paid plan and will make this the brain of our worship/weekend planning.
I am not new to ProPresenter but we just upgraded to ProPresenter 5. All I’ll say is that it’s a no-brainer! It integrates incredibly well with Planning Center and I love how I can train someone on it in less than 20 minutes.
I used ScreenFlow a while ago here and there, and now I am starting to use it to record tutorials/workflows for our volunteers who use Planning Center and ProPresenter. They can watch how I do it and then can use it as a reference as they learn the ropes. As a blogger, you can also use ScreenFlow to record tutorials to post on your blog. So who knows, you may see a couple pop up here. If you want you can order it here from Telestream.
So there you go. Some tools I’ve been learning to use lately.
Also, my friend Chris has a helpful blog series called Worship Leader’s Toolkit where he shares some valuable tools he’s using in worship ministry. Check it out!
What techie-tools are you using? I’d love to check some of them out!
A few days ago I had to show my pastor how to take screenshots on his mac. After showing him 2 common methods, I came across an awesome third method from iHospital. Here are all three methods:
1. To take a picture of your entire screen as it appears hold down the Command+Shift+3 keys in that order.
You will hear a snapshot noise and the image thumbnail will appear on your desktop.
2. To take a picture of a selection of your screen, hold down Command+Shift+4 in that order.
Use the tool to select the area in which you want to tae the picture of.
3. To take a picture of a window on your screen, hold Command+Shift+4 in that order, release all three keys and tap the Space Bar. Then click the window which you want to take the picture of.
Try them out and I bet they’ll become part of your workflow.
(via iHospital)
This past weekend I had the privilege of serving at the CAOG Roots ’11 Youth and Young Adult Convention. I was responsible for the programming of the main sessions as well overseeing all worship and creative aspects.
Part of what I really wanted to do was to get a live twitter stream going whereby students can tweet using a simple hashtag (e.g. #Roots11) and have it show up immediately on a screen. I figured this would give everyone an opportunity to share what God was doing in their lives throughout the course of the weekend.
After searching for a little while, I found a solution that was perfect for our needs. Here’s a simple tutorial of how you can achieve a similar result:
In case you are wondering, I use “command-1″ to toggle the output screen in ProPresenter.
Be sure to check out the results of our live twitter stream.
Let me know if you have any questions.
When it comes to the “world wide web”, If you are remotely human, you try to be meticulous about your online accounts and login credentials (I use 1Password to easily manage these).
Generally, after doing some online banking or some secret online birthday shopping for your wife, it’s a good idea to clear your browser’s cache, cookies, and history trail.
However, with recent hacks on facebook (think “firesheep”), there’s no better time to tighten things up than right now. Users’ privacy and online safety have been questionable and with this in mind, I want to share 2 simple things you can do in facebook to make for a safer experience.
“Jon, if you have time can you grab this video on YouTube for me? I need it for Keynote.”
I have received this question several times as more and more of my “entourage” of friends and pastors are using Macs. If you own a Mac and use Keynote you are going to enjoy my Ultimate Guide to Importing a YouTube Video into a Keynote Presentation.
Two things you’ll need before we start:
**UPDATE (Aug 12, 2011): It seems as though Google has removed this extension. A great alternative is Evom. I use it to download most of the time.
The first thing you’re going to want to do is download Google’s Chrome browser for Mac (it’s blazing fast!). Once you have that installed, head over to the Chrome Web Store to get the Chrome YouTube Downloader.
Now you’re ready to download the video that you want to include in your presentation. Head over to YouTube and once you are able to view the video you should be able to see a download button with resolution options.
Once the video is downloaded, make sure it has a file extensions appended at the end. If not, click the video file’s title and then append the appropriate video extension, matching the extension from the download button as in the image above. [example: "japanvideo" should be "japanvideo.flv" if I downloaded the 240p or the 480p videos.]
Perian is “the swiss-army knife for QuickTime. You’ll have to download Perian as it is a nifty open source QuickTime component that adds native support for almost any video that you will attempt to view on your Mac. This is a key component for viewing your video once you’ve downloaded it.
Simply double-click the Perian.prefPane image on the top left.
I leave the settings as is.
Once you launch Keynote, select a theme that will compliment your presentation and content.
For this tutorial I used the White Theme (if you watched the video, I could’ve have simply used the Black Theme).
As you can see, the video appears in my Keynote presentation and I am now ready style it and save it.
It’s also good to note that Keynote saves your video in the presentation itself. That means you can trash the downloaded .flv or .mp4 file but I’ve learned that it’s better to be safe than sorry, so I keep them on an external hard drive.
Hope that was simple enough.
Let me know in the comments if you enjoyed this and/or if you’re stuck and I will be glad to help you out!
Being a musician, I’m used to sharing my gear-list, and I know that some of you would want to look at my tech-list for life, ministry, music, and blogging.
Hope this list helps someone. If you have any questions or want to know how I use a certain app, shoot me a comment and I’d be happy to explain!
Includes a cool Tron Theme
You may have picked up on it already, but here on my blog, I use the Standard Theme, a premium WordPress theme designed with serious bloggers in mind. They just announced a special 20% discount on all Standard Theme products, starting now and lasting until Tuesday the 15th. Just like an Apple product, the theme looks great out of the box, and makes it easy to get started with advertising and social media. Standard comes with the popular “Follower Counter” feature, which integrates your RSS and Twitter followers. It seriously uses SEO best practices and chances are you’ll notice an increase in search traffic almost immediately.
The Support License (this is the one I bought – so worth it), which usually costs a one-time fee of $99, is on sale for about $79 and comes with technical support for life! In addition to that you get access to a growing community of developers and designers, as well as new styles (called customizations) every month. Even better, once you purchase the Support License, all future version upgrades to Standard Theme are included! Purchase once, upgrade forever. It really is a great deal.
Mashable called Standard Theme one of the 8 best premium themes available for WordPress in 2010. Any blogger who wants to increase their traffic, begin selling advertisements, or improve the speed of their blog should seriously consider making the jump to Standard Theme. I’m glad I did!
Husband to the lovely @prismanna. Pastor (worship, young adults) @westonroadchurch. . Blogger/Founder of http://worshipdrummer.ca. Most importantly I ♥ Jesus
