Just a quick note to say that one of our email accounts was hacked this morning. We are not in Spain and do not need help getting home! It seems that the password was too easy to guess. You might want to think about changing your own password right now as right now  someone else has all those personal emails that gmail kindly stores (and we don’t as they kindly deleted them!)   I do hope no one sent this crook any money!

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!

I would like to invite you to take a survey to help me get to know you more and plan for the future. We are actually hoping to get a redesign up very shortly (possibly even this week), so this will give us a good baseline to look at what people think of the new site after they have had a chance to get used to it. So, please take just a few moments of your time and click here to take the survey.

If you are a Mac and Logos user, you might want to delay installing the Snow Leopard update of Mac Os X by hopefully just a few days or so. Apple’s publicity for this version of its operating system over the last few months can’t seem to decide whether to describe this almost as a minor update or as a whole new operating system. The truth seems to be that while there are not very many new features on this upgrade, the whole code has been rewritten [UPDATE: this is actually not correct, tho the system has been updated significantly to take advantage of 64bit processing]. PC users are used to being very anxious about installing upgrades. Mac users tend to be eager to do it ideally on the first day it is released. 7GB extra hard disk space and a faster leaner operating system with even better video handling and video iChat that will leave PC web chatting even further behind in the dust (full 640×480 video chat without stuttering over even quite a modest broadband speed is what we are being told!). A Mac is worth the purchase for its ability to video chat over the internet alone.

There has however been some reports from the developer community of incompatibilities between Logos Bible software and Snow Leopard. Some have spoken about books causing crashes, and of font problems.

A Logos spokesman said, “The release code for Snow Leopard isn’t available to anyone outside of Apple yet, so we have no way to test it to make sure Logos for Mac will work without incident. However, we have been testing it on beta builds, and it seems that there is one issue with the Charis SIL Italic font that will probably require a version 1.2.1 to fix. Before we fix it, we want to make sure that it’s still a problem in the release code–it is possible Apple may have changed the code that was causing ours to misbehave–and for that matter, that nothing else surfaces. Once we’ve been able to test it on the release version of Snow Leopard, we’ll get a new version out ASAP. The fix should be pretty simple, so we will probably be able to have the update out very shortly after release.”

I am shocked that Mac don’t let developers like Logos have access to the release code early. I would have thought that it would be a no-brainer to help prevent compatibility problems. It does make you wonder about any possible issues with other software, and there is a line on the Snow Leopard website that as part of the install process “Snow Leopard checks your applications to make sure they’re compatible and sets aside any programs known to be incompatible.”

So, speaking personally, you bet I have bought the family pack version of the upgrade and am eagerly awaiting that shiny disk and beautifully designed package. You bet I will be installing it on my wife’s machine immediately. But, I will wait just a little while before doing so on my logos machine. If you do decide to be brave and get access to the release code, sounds like Logos will be eager to receive any bug information. Visit the Logos Bible Software and Snow Leopard thread in their community forum and let them know.

Yes, you read that right! And it has nothing to do with me being a blogger (sometimes I think I should have become a tech blogger- imagine that free samples of the latest gadgets to review!)

I told you at the end of last week that I had a Macbook breakdown. Well, I simply took the laptop into the Apple Store, dropped it off, and the next day I had a phone call. The logic board had died, I was told, and because I had AppleCare and they had previously replaced my logicboard several times already (faulty batch I guess?) they offered to give me a free brand new Macbook Pro instead!

I will miss my blackbook, but the aluminium unibody beckons enticingly!

They even helped me to rescue the file I needed from the hard disk (I stupidly forgot to store it in the area that is automatically backed up to the web!) and when the new machine arrives at the store they will transfer all my data and applications across from the hard disk of my old computer for me.

There is no way on earth that any PC company would do this for me. AppleCare rocks!

I have said it before, and I will say it again. I do not miss my PC-owning days. I have to use a PC regularly for work, and my only regret about jumping ship for my personal stuff is that I sometimes get confused (especially with the latest PC version of Microsoft Office which has changed all the menus around for some obscure reason)

Please pray for me this week for last minute flashes of inspiration for my book as I do the final tweaks of what will be the last major edit of my book in the limited spare time I have. This is also a very busy day-job week for me, and with the children off extra grace is required!