A Video for Geeks (iPad/Kindle/Touch/Incredible Discussion)

The iPad as a Debate and Presentation Tool

So, folks have noticed that in pictures and video clips of my most recent debate in Michigan that I had a little new something I was using, so I thought for all the geeks in the audience this would be a geek video.

I would answer all the questions that people were asking me in a video so I don't have to type this stuff over and over and over again. What people saw, of course, was an Apple iPad, and this is my Apple iPad.

So what I did in the debate with Sheikha Wall, and would have done in the second debate with Sheikha Wall if he had shown up, I used this in three different ways in the same debate. First, when you go into a debate or when you go into a presentation in church, you're always up against the connection to the video projector question.

If they have them installed, do they have a connection up front or only in the back? Normally it's only in the back. Sometimes it's up front, which is really nice, because when you have a presentation, as I do in Keynote on my MacBook Pro, sometimes it's nice to have notes, presenter's notes, in the presentation itself.

Well, if my computer's in the back of the room, presenter notes aren't going to do me any good. So I had discovered with the Apple iTouch various programs that you could use that would allow you to control your Mac remotely with your touch.

And there's actually two of them. One is a standard Keynote presentation that actually works with the Keynote software. Then there are some others that had various orientations you could use and things like that.

The problem was this is a very small unit. And once you start trying to put your current slide, your next slide, and presenter notes on a screen that big, maybe when I was 20 I could have read something like that, but I'm not 20 anymore.

So one of the reasons I wanted to get the iPad is that's a whole lot more real estate as far as the screen goes. And I'll talk a little bit more about that in a moment. So I used the same software, the same apps, but now it's on a nice big screen.

And so I can wirelessly control my MacBook Pro, either if I set up an ad hoc network in using my MacBook Pro, I can actually fully control the unit, bring up programs, bring up accordance, Keynote, whatever else it might be.

Now in the debates, I was only using Keynote. So I used a simpler, I think a little more reliable app to control the presentation. And so what I have on my screen is what is being projected. And I just flip across the screen with my finger to move from slide to slide during the presentation.

And if there are presenters notes, they'll be at the bottom of the page in plenty large font to read very, very easily. If it's a lengthy note, I can scroll up the entire note right there on my screen, then just flick the finger and you're off to the next slide.

And it worked perfectly. As soon as I sit down, once I'm done my presentation, I'm done with the projector, then I switch over to an app called Penultimate. And I should have grabbed this. I apologize for not doing that.

But a friend over in London had found for me when I was over there in February, the Dagi Stylus, D-A-G-I Stylus, which is specifically designed for iPads, Blackberries, that kind of screen. And this particular stylus works very, very well to write on the iPad.

It works on the touch as well. And so I switch over to Penultimate. And so I'm writing my notes on the screen as the other person is making his presentation. Now, obviously, if the other guy was going first, the order in which I'd be doing this would be different.

And what's really neat is I just flip and I'm to the next page. It's very easy to go back and forth between pages, circle things, erase things, etc., etc. I had had that ability back in 2006 on an HP tablet computer that I had at that time.

And I had, I think, a total of three of them. But the hard drives on those things would just fail constantly. It was nice when I had it. I used it in the Shabir Ali debate. But I really haven't had that ability since then.

And the iPad gave me that ability to do that. Then once the cross-examination and rebuttals, closing statements were done, I used the Penultimate. I can go back and forth the stuff that I've written down for that part of the debate.

Then I use the case I have for it, set it up in landscape mode, sitting right in front of me. And I go to the Olive Tree app where I have the English Bible and then Greek and Hebrew text in parallel windows.

And that, likewise, is what allows me to use this while preaching. Yesterday, I used this to preach at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church. And it's still at the same section. I know this won't show up very well, but you saw it flip over there.

There is the screen from Hebrews chapter 7 where I was preaching last night. The English on the top, the Greek on the bottom. The Greek font is...everything is nice and huge, easy to read. And with the Olive Tree, notice I've got a little note right here that I've given for myself.

It just pops up the note right there. So you can stick your sermon notes directly into the text and they're always there. And of course, the Greek text is fully parsable, searchable, stuff like that. And that's enough real estate.

I could do that with the touch. I could do the exact same thing. It looks identical to it. There just isn't enough real estate on this screen to have any context. If your font's big enough to read, that's all you've got on this little teeny tiny screen.

The font here is probably...I'd say about 18 point printed out on a laser printer. At least 18 point in the Greek. So it's very, very readable while preaching from a distance. I didn't use any glasses either for distance or for close up when preaching from it.

You just scroll like this. The Greek follows as you scroll. It moves to the next text. And to get to verses, very, very easy with just tap, tap, tap. Get there fast and you probably can in a paper Bible.

So what I do is I put that in front of me during the audience questions. So someone says, well how do you explain John 5, 26, tap, tap, I'm there. If it's in the New Testament, in the Old Testament I'll have to do an extra tap to open up the Hebrew or the Greek Septuagint depending on which one I want to use.

But it's very, very quick. I do have the Logos app on here and have downloaded a number of my primary sources in Logos to do it as well so I can go either way. And of course I have an excellent Quran program in it.

I also have a Hadith program. The problem is I haven't fixed this problem yet. It's as soon as you open it up, there's this loud Arabic call to prayer that plays. And I actually, when I was on the Paul Edwards show in Detroit, I tried to open up a Hadith reference and I was hiding it underneath the desk, trying to keep it away from the microphone as this call to prayer comes up.

So I need to find some way of deactivating that. I may not be able to. But anyway, so three different ways that I used the iPad just in that one debate. And it just, it's a debating machine. It really is extremely useful.

And then as I said yesterday, I used it to preach from both services. By the way, the battery life is exceptional. I, for example, took it with me on the plane and it's great to watch videos on it. I've watched videos on my iPods on planes for a long time.

Why the iPad Is Different from a Kindle

And I thought I'd really died and gone to heaven when I got the iPod Touch because the old iPods had the screen, but it's that big and you're trying to watch a movie on it. And, you know, for example, I watched that great World War II movie, Battle the Bulge on the way out on the plane.

And you know, it's okay on the touch, but it's really nice on the iPad. And by the time I watched that whole movie, it's a fairly long movie, got to Detroit, I think I was down to 92%, I think. I'd only used like 8 of the battery.

And during that entire debate, even using it wirelessly, so because it has to have the Wi-Fi on to control my MacBook Pro, I think I still had 74 after an entire, having it on continuously, using it continuously, writing on it, the whole nine yards, you know, three, three and a half hour period of time during the debate.

So the battery life on the iPad is great. Now, a lot of folks ask me the same question. And that is, they say, but I'm thinking about getting a Kindle. And of course, Kindle 3 will be coming out, I think sometime later this year.

This is the Kindle 2, which I use. And they say, well, now you've got an iPad and you've got a Kindle, which one should I get? That's like asking, should I get a car or a dog? They're not meant to do the same thing.

They really are very different things. Now, I don't know what's going to, the Kindle 3 is going to look like, what they're going to try to do. I really don't know, but this, the Kindle is a reader. It is meant to do one thing, and that is to allow you to read a book.

And I love my Kindle for a couple of different reasons. That screen, I can look at for hours on end without getting eyestrain. I think this is easier to read, and of course, you can adjust the fonts, and I normally have it fairly large, something like that.

I can read this for hours on end without eyestrain, because you're not staring at a light source. This ink stuff, which all the readers are using, is really fantastic, especially I'm closing in on 50.

For those of us whose eyes have been working for a long time, this is just fantastic. And of course, this is also what allows me to take new books, which are only available like in this format, and digitize them, digitize them in the sense of MP3.

This unit has read many books to me in MP3 format that I then put on my iPod Nano and take on my bike rides, on my very long bike rides, my many multi-hour bike rides. I did one this morning listening to The End of God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens.

It was two and a half hours, 46 miles on the bike, finished the whole thing off. How did I do that? This. Now, if I can get a book in PDF or Word, I can do it a lot faster. Text Speech Pro on the MacBook Pro format will convert books very, very quickly.

That's what I really like. I can pull anything I want out of Logos and just dump it into Text Speech Pro, and within a matter of minutes, I have a very, very listenable, very understandable MP3 that I can listen to.

And frequently, they're many hours long, but that's how you redeem the time. But if I only have it on Kindle, the recording takes as long as it takes. You can't do it in just a matter of minutes. You can speed this up if you want a little bit, but it's still frequently something I leave running overnight.

I got a program called MacSome, M-A-C-S-O-M-E, Audio Recorder, and it'll break, as you're recording, it'll break your recording up into hour-long segments. Because once you get a three-hour thing, one little slip on the Nano, even once you've converted to audio book, and you're sitting there fast-forwarding forever to try to find out where in the world you were.

So it's really good to do that. But I'll leave this running overnight, and I'll just record an entire book in the MP3 format, and load it onto the iPod Nano, and away we go. So when people say, which one should I get?

Should I get the Kindle, or should I get the iPad? I don't see them as competitors. Yeah, I know, the iPad has the Mac store and stuff. Me and Amazon, I know Amazon like the back of my hand. And Amazon is important along those lines.

It's an incredible source of information. It's also an incredible source for just simply getting the books you need to get and getting them fast. And especially with this, you can get it in a minute if it's available in that format.

The two are just not meant to do the same thing. And I'd start worrying a little bit if Amazon tries to make the Kindle a competitor to the iPad, because they're not designed to do the same things. That screen is so much easier to read for long periods of time on the eyes than the iPad is, because you're not staring at a backlit screen.

I don't see them as competitors at all. What's also nice about the Kindle, of course, if you haven't gotten one yet, is I just today, just a few minutes ago, saw on Twitter that Kindle for Droid was out.

And I'm a Verizon customer, and so I'm never going to see an iPhone on Verizon, I don't think. And so the Droid, this is the Droid Incredible, is exactly that. It's incredible. And now it has the Kindle app on it.

And when you put notes into your Kindle, into your Droid, into your BlackBerry, I don't have a BlackBerry anymore, but I had one, my Touch, my iPad, because Amazon Kindle is on iPad as well, on my Mac, because it's on Mac now.

If I put a note underlining anything in any one of those, it then transfers that note to all the rest. So if I have notes in my Quran, and I put the note in on this, the next time I sync through WhisperNet, then those same notes, those same markings, will end up on my Droid, on my iPad, on my Mac.

That's cool. There's no twist about that. That is a really, really, really useful thing to have. And so, yeah, the iPad, I was going to mention at the beginning, if you are suffering from iPad hatred derangement syndrome, which I have seen in my chat channel.

I mean, there are some people in my chat channel, I just mention my iPad, and they just go off. I mean, you would think that they had been abused as a child by someone swinging an iPad at them. I mean, they just lose it.

Most of them have never even seen one, touched one, anything, but, oh, I just hate that. It's just an overgrown iPod Touch. Well, maybe it is, but I like the iPod Touch. And since it's overgrown, I can write on it, and I can preach from it, and it is a tremendous tool, especially when you do what I do.

If you're going to be in a debate, man, it has turned out to be everything that I had hoped that it would be. For those who care, that's the 32 gigabyte Wi-Fi edition. I didn't need a 3G edition or anything like that.

I'm not buying a data plan or something like that. It's normally somewhere near my Mac, so I can access things that way. And I'm not putting music on it and stuff like that. It's primarily for my Logos library.

It's primarily for the Olive Tree, the Quran, the Hadith, and for remote control of my Mac. And 32 gigs is plenty, plenty for that. So there's the geek report for everybody who is asking, well, you know, what do you think about it?

How did it work? It worked flawlessly. I did not have any problems with it whatsoever in the debates, and I'm really looking forward to using it in my presentations at churches in the future, because so often I'm separated from my Mac by a long distance.

And I'll certainly be using that in the debates with Christopher Hitchens coming up and with Robertson Jennis and things like that. So definitely a good investment. I very much thank those who have, that was another item that was on the ministry resource list.

And there's few things that people do that are more encouraging. When churches support us regularly, when people support us regularly, when people purchase things from the ministry resource list, probably most encouraging things that people do.

Very, very practical, very, very useful. And so there's my geek report. Hope that was useful to you. And thanks for watching.