Recently I have had a lot of people ask me to recommend apps for them. It seems like everyone is getting an iPad. iPhone or iSomething just recently. I have settled into a place where I have been able to make my iPad work for me and I spend a lot of time using it to read, study, take notes, and even read a daily paper.
So here are some apps that I have found helpful. There are so many apps out there and so many that do the same thing. it is quite possible that you have found some that work better for you than the ones I am recommending. Feel free to post apps that have helped you as a comment. Also, please note that these are all from the Apple iTunes Store. I do not do Android.
1. The Most handy app for study that I use on a daily basis is the ESV Bible app. It is a very simple interface that easily navigates through the books of the Bible. It is my favorite translation of the Bible, but the key feature of this app is the search interface. Usually when you search for a word in most Bible apps you come up with a huge list of occurrences of each word in the Bible and if the reference you are looking for is in Revelation, good luck! You’ll be scrolling for half an hour. The search results give the first two occurrences for each book of the Bible and then it lets you look at more if you want to.
2. I use the Logos Bible app for more in depth Bible study. Since I have a high end version of the software on my laptop, the free Logos app allows me to use most of the books I have purchased on my iPad. Even if you have not purchased the program, the Logos Bible app can still be very helpful for personal study. You can add resources as you go.
3. The Bible.is app is excellent for listening to the Bible. It comes with a variety of downloadable, free audio versions of the Bible including the ESV.
4. Almost every morning I read a newspaper on my iPad that is produced specifically for me from the Editions app. It is produced by AOL and it draws down content from a wide variety of news outlets on the web and compiles them in a useful newspaperlike interface. My local weather, Facebook friends’ birthdays, local news, as well as a whole host of other content in sections of my choosing are available. But one of the most unique features is that I can tell it to stop giving me articles about Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber, but ask it to give me more articles that mention faith, the Middle East, the economy, or whatever.
5. An app that is available for both the iPad and iPhone that has been beneficial for me in ministry is the Find iPhone app. This app allows my wife to locate me at any point. I want her to have the freedom to look me up. When I told someone about this recently, they told me they didn’t like that because they really just want their wife to trust them more than to look up their location. This app helps my wife to know that my life is an open book to her. She has used it a handful of times, because she didn’t want to interrupt me but wondered what I was up to.
6. I use my Kindle app a lot. I enjoy reading, and the idea of having an e-reader has grown on me. I still reserve the Kindle app for mostly fiction, but i have read a couple of biographies on it.
7. Lastly, I like to use the Evernote app for taking notes and keeping them organized. I use it for sermon notes, book quotes, and meetings. the program allows you to organize the notes by various tags, by date, and by notebook. All notes are searchable allowing you to quickly recall that quote from a book you cant quite come up with.
I haven’t mentioned Angry Birds, Facebook, Amazon, Shazam, TED, Khan Academy or Sketchbook Pro. There are so many apps that I can sometimes get overwhelmed just trying to find a good calculator. But when it is all said in done, I encourage you put your devices to work for you. Don’t serve them. I have to remind myself regularly that my iPad is the tool . . .
