It is sad that a true desire for excellence seems to be very rare today. We would do well to look at what we can learn from the most successful company of our era: Apple.  Here are some comparisons between the values Apple embodies, and those of  many companies today:

 

Be passionate	Be rational
Lead, don’t follow	Be cautious
Aim to surprise	Aim to satisfy
Be unreasonable	Be practical
Innovate incessantly	Innovate when necessary
Sweat the details	Get it mostly right
Think like an engineer and feel like an artist	Think like an engineer and feel like an accountant

The bottom line: Apple’s unique success is a product of its unique values–which are uniquely innovation-friendly and customer-centric. . . Imagine if Apple’s passions were the norm rather than the exception. What if the world’s leading insurance company or publisher or bank or airline or hotel chain was driven by these ideals? What if you encountered them every time you talked to someone at the Internal Revenue Service or had to apply for a building permit? OK, now I’m hallucinating. But I still can’t help but dream of a world in which Apple has become a lot less exceptional because its core values have become a lot less exceptional. Apple may have patented a lot of things, but it hasn’t patented the values that made it, for a time at least, the world’s most successful company. Apple is proof positive that innovation matters now!

via What Makes Apple Apple | Management Innovation eXchange.

Apple marketing, and Apple users like me, have a tendency to almost gloat that “it just works.” The vast majority of time that claim is true, to be honest. Owning an Apple product really does mean not having to worry about viruses or spy ware, not having to reinstall the operating system to speed it up again, and not worrying about drivers or programs being incompatible. It means eagerly installing upgrades to operating systems the day they come out. It really is a joy. Before today, I had almost forgotten how frustrating computers can sometimes be.

But, one thing that is not often admitted is that there are times when things don’t go quite so smoothly, even with Apple products. I think one reason we don’t talk much about this is quite simply what happens when things do go wrong. Apple customer care and technical support is of better quality even than their products. If I had to choose between giving up my Apple equipment and giving up my Apple support, I would struggle.

Take today, for example. I have been noticing a significant slow-down on my laptop recently, and wondered if it was due to the fact that somehow or other I had severely messed up my contacts list. Thanks to a not-so-smart decision to synchronize my address book with Google Contacts, years of neglect, and some chaos somehow caused, my computer was desperately trying to index and sync 20,000 contacts! Most of these were “No names” and/or duplicates.

I successfully pruned out all the rubbish (it took a while!) but then found that I simply couldn’t get the new data to synchronize properly with the Mobileme server. Stumped I turned to the website. After exhausting a couple of fantastically clear and helpful articles (Apple support articles are the best!) I was still stuck. So I called for help, in this case, an online chat support agent. My problem being somewhat messy, it took a while for us to fix it, but the guy was pleasant, knew what he was doing, and even chatted a bit with me while we were waiting for various tasks. End result? A very satisfied customer and a much more reasonable 249 contacts successfully syncing between all my Apple devices!

After that, all I had to do was set up my existing iPhone to give to my wife, putting it on a ridiculously cheap O2 “simplicity” tariff. This massive sacrifice is not as big as it sounds. I had decided to give it to her a few days before getting my own upgrade to the new iPhone 4.0. A wise move. She gets to enjoy the phone knowing that at least until I get hold of the latest gadget I will be using her old non-smart handset. And boy is it non-smart! I tried to figure out how to set up caller divert or access voicemail on it, and I can’t work out either. I will soldier on, as at least I can use it to answer calls, and hopefully Andree will become very attached to my old phone as HER iPhone pretty quickly. When the iPhone 5 comes out, we might even give that iPhone 3 to one of our children! If you are thinking of upgrading, don’t throw out your old iPhone, you have probably forgotten by now just how much of a joy it could be to someone still struggling with a Noikia or something. If you really can’t find a home for it, I do have five children, though most of them are too young for any mobile phone at all. In fact, come to think of it, don’t even throw out that old normal phone either, they can be recycled and what we take for granted or are bored with could be a lifeline to someone else.

In the video below (from Tim Challies on the Kindle vs iPad) you can see how both an Amazon Kindle and an iPad work as e-readers. What a lot of people don’t immediately realise is that the iPad can actually work as a Kindle, allowing you to use Apple’s swanky new device with any e-books you already own, or subsequently purchase from the Amazon store. Thus there are two bookstores on the iPad. Allow Tim to demonstrate:

Watch Kindle vs iPad on Vimeo

Watch on Vimeo (works on iPhone or iPad)

This video says it all. And as a direct result, I bought myself an iPad on a business trip to the Newark area this week!

If you are excited about the new Mac Notebooks, go to one (or both?!!) of the following URLs providing live coverage, including photos of the announcement happening RIGHT NOW!

(HT Ian Jukes on iChat)

I never thought I would say this, but hold on to your plastic. You really DON’T want to be buying a Mac laptop right now. Have I gone insane? Am I converting back to PC? No, don’t worry, this Mac evangelist is not about to backslide into the world of WINDOZE. It’s just that all the rumors about Apple soon to significantly update its range of laptops is getting closer to being true by the day.

The following MacRumors article certainly would be enough on its own for me to just wait a few days more if I was about to buy a Mac. You don’t want to buy old spec, especially not if something really dramatic is about to be launched!

HT – Ian Jukes (via iChat)

Its not complete. Several important features do not work yet. BUT, you can now get Logos Bible Software to work on a mac! I really, really like the interface. If you own a mac, and either have a second PC or run parallels there is no no reason NOT to buy a logos package of your own as you CAN use your unlocked PC books on the new mac version.

Dont uninstall Parallels yet as its still early days. If you are like me, and don’t want to waste too much hard disk space you can get parallels logos to look for its files in the shared folder that is actually your documents on the Mac, you can tell Mac Logos to look in the same place for its book files. Works just fine. Searches are FAST! Collections can be copied across also.

Its possible to drag say a bible window into a different workspace or even monitor and make full use of the flexibility of the mac screen.

All is sweet. As they add new features it will get sweeter still!!

Thanks Logos!

I have already told you how much I love books. Every book needs a Christian owner who will cherish it, care for it, place it lovingly on a bookshelf, and, ideally, even read it! But the truth is, with so many great books on the market today, most of us simply don’t have time to read every book from cover to cover. Of course, it’s good to sit with a book and just read it. But there are also times when we want to dip into books. Times when perhaps we are studying a certain passage in Scripture. This is when Bible software comes into its own. The ability to search a book or a collection of books for a subject or specific Bible reference is invaluable.

There are several different types of Bible software available. They each provide a different tool that is designed to do a different job. Comparing them is a bit like comparing a screwdriver and a chisel. Sure, you can use a screwdriver to do some jobs for which a chisel would be more appropriate, but if you tried it the other way around, you’d notice the difference! There is overlap in the design, but they are very different. I’m only going to talk today about two Bible software programs. Both of these are serious programs that, most importantly to me, make it possible to search through a remarkably large number of books. These two programs are Accordance and Logos Bible Software.

I should declare at the outset a significant bias. I have used Logos for a number of years and have a relationship with them whereby purchasers from this blog get a significant discount, and I obtain a referral payment. I have no such arrangement with Accordance.

Because I have been using it for so long, Logos has enough of a hold on me that it delayed by years my inevitable final switch from a PC to a Mac. “What would be the point of a computer without it?” I would have said. Parallels, a virtual PC program for Macs, means that I can run Logos alongside all my other Mac programs. Of course, it still doesn’t look as elegant as the Mac programs, but it works better and faster than it did on my reasonably high spec PC. Macs just don’t crash very much. There is no other way of saying it—Logos on a parallels virtual PC is fantastic. It is faster to open, and runs most searches more quickly than it ever did on my reasonably specked PC!

It is probably unfair for me to compare the interfaces of the two programs as I have only recently begun using Accordance and I am already very familiar with Logos. I can say that Logos is a fairly typical Windows program, using Internet Explorer as its base. Accordance, on the other hand, is a native Apple Mac program. Users who are passionate about one platform or the other will tend to like one or the other of the programs’ interfaces.

The fact is, the two interfaces are not at all alike. If you are used to one of them, the other will seem quite strange, since the interface philosophies between the two applications are very different. The Accordance team has focused their attention on what they call the “work flow” in studying and getting information on the Bible or a specific Bible tool in depth. Some people I know who are more familiar with it than I am definitely love it.

By spending a bit of time learning the ropes it is possible to do many of the same searches. I find, however, that I still like the simplicity of Logos’ passage guide, although you have to do some work identifying groups of books and adding them to the search to actually mine the depths of your library. Being able to simply enter a passage, hit the search button, and watch Logos search for that verse through the immense library of books I have amassed over the years is a major bonus.

Accordance, although its historical focus has centered less on a ‘library’ motif and more on searching individual books, does, in fact, have a similar feature with its “search all” function (available from “File – New” for some reason, rather than “Search”). The results are similar, although they are presented in a different manner. Until recently I thought that one thing which neither software program appeared to do well was to focus that search to a specific Bible verse rather than an entire passage, especially in theology journals. A search for Ephesians 1:3 would often return results on the whole of Ephesians 1, or worse yet, on the entire epistle. In Accordance, however, a new search in the “all tools” section provides a format which can say “Ephesians 1:3 <NOT> Ephesians 1:2.” This will do what I described by excluding references to that verse, and it will also exclude references to the chapter as a whole. A recent improvement to the Logos search engine allows a very similar function. You need to call up a basic search and type something like Bible=”Ephesians 1:3.”

Please do not complain about the speed of either program in performing this mammoth task. Just think how long it would take you to do this from a manual approach! Get up, walk downstairs, put the kettle on, and it will probably be done before the kettle even has a chance to boil. If you have a Mac, it may finish before you even leave the room! The only drawback with a big library is that you can return too many results to sift through. But when studying an obscure verse and wanting to know what thousands of writers have had to say about it, having this information at your fingertips is invaluable. You simply couldn’t do it at all without Bible software, so to complain about the interfaces seems a bit churlish.

On the other hand, I did like the ability of Accordance to select a few verses and generate a report on the relative importance, frequency, and uses elsewhere in the Bible of the words found in it. Logos has a similar feature which is more graphical and is apparently based on CIA technology for analyzing the importance of large volumes of data. There are some search features for specific books that Accordance has which are very different to those which Logos has implemented.

To be quite honest, neither program really excites me in its user interface. The truth is, both Logos and Accordance are not quite as easy and intuitive to use (especially for the more complex searches) as someone who hates to read manuals or watch video training would like! Logos intends to port their software to the world’s best operating environment. But don’t hold your breath waiting for the much delayed end result, and certainly don’t delay buying a Mac for that reason!

For me, the key reason to purchase Bible software is because of the number of books you can get with it. In that regard, Logos wins hands down. The range and breadth of materials available is simply stunning, and massively outweighs the list available for Accordance. Some of the most important ones (such as the Word Biblical Commentary series and the Theological Journal Library) are available for both programs. (I am told that in the latter on Accordance it is possible to search by author, something which I haven’t yet figured out in Logos.) But there are a number of helpful scholarly resources not available for Logos that are available for Accordance. These include (most importantly) Zondervan materials such as the Essential, Personal Growth, and Scholarly Bible Study Suites, and two standard lexicons, NIDNTT and NIDOTTE, as well as some other scholarly resources.

Few pastors or serious students of the Bible would be anything less than ecstatic to receive a gift like this, provided they are not so computer-phobic that they simply use it as a very expensive tea coaster! Perhaps you could club together with members of your church to gather sufficient funds to invest in a copy of one of these programs for your leader.

If you can afford it, and already own a Mac, you should seriously consider buying both programs. It is worth buying Parallels and Win XP just so you can use Logos! If you don’t have a Mac, the choice is simple—buy the biggest Logos Bible Software package you can possibly afford, since you can always bring it with you if you do ever make a jump to the Apple platform.

Observant readers of my blog will have noticed that I didn’t post any larger photos of Rob Rufus when I spoke about Together On A Mission and interviewed Rob Rufus. One reason for this was that the snapshots I took while we were together were ruined in my hurry as I had the camera on the wrong setting. As a result the color was all wrong and I thought they were beyond salvation.

Well, my MacBook and the wonderful iPhoto software came to the rescue. I have never been able to understand photography software (although Picasa from google was reasonably easy) and so was thrilled to see Tamasin and Henry master it in no time. They took one of the following two photos each and were able to repair them admirably. At moments like this a father is proud of his kids and a relatively new MacBook owner is proud of his laptop!

The second installment in my Mac videos, in which I mention Logos Bible software, parallels and also some of the other things that make the jump tricky for a PC user.