A few weeks ago I lead a short, two session study of the Apostle's Creed for my Bible study group. The study was based on the premise that for someone to take the trouble to write a creed that it must have been in response to something.

The first part of the study summarises some of the historical, theological and social pressures faced by Christians with the second session a review of the Apostle's Creed. Session two's focus is on looking for what the creed says in response to the context in which it was written.

My preferred study style is to take the text being studied, it's historical context and then discuss this with the rest of the group.

I hope it's of value to some of you.

The Apostle's Creed Part 1
The Apostle's Creed Part 2

In my weekly (well, almost) yarn over at Hydrapinion on Wednesday I took a look at FriendFeed. It seems that it's suddenly become social networking's soup d'jour.

FriendFeed simply describes itself as "a service that makes it easy to share with friends online". I prefer to think of it as an online presence aggregator. It takes my blog posts, Twitter feed, Flickr photos, YouTube videos and a bunch of other services and creates a one stop shop so that folks interested in what I say and do (in the online world) can find it all in one place.

The full story can be read here.

I'm not going to say anything. Just watch this an be totally amazed.

The recent release of the new Kindle eBook reader has me thinking (yeah, it had to happen again!) about device convergence. In the olden days, people (well, nerds really) carried a PDA, mobile phone, computer and whatever other gadgets took their fancy (HP scientific calcular anybody?). Since those days in 80s and 90s we've seen a marked shift.

The IT industry tends to move between extreme position. Think about insourcing vs outsourcing, off the shelf vs bespoke development and so on. Depending on the economic climate and what consultants and analysts thought they could get away with everyone seemed to oscillate between some extreme view or another. One of the debates that we used to have was the argument between having a "best of breed" device vs a generalist. This of it as the jack of all trades. It wasn;t an "expert" in any one thing but it did many things competently.

Back in early 2007 Steve Jobs mesmerised the world with his reality distortion field when he announced the first iPhone. In effect, what hed described was a converged device that fused a computer, phone and PDA. What made the iPhone different was that Apple simply did the convergence better than anyone else.

I've not used a Kindle but it looks to be a great device. That said, I doubt I'd buy one as it's too big for me to carry in my normal kit.

The iPhone's biggest weakness, in my opinion, is with messaging. The lack of a unified inbox and search are serious deficiencies that desperately need to be addressed in the iPhone 3.0 software. And let's not get started on the lack of true push email. In that regard, the BlackBerry simply smashes the iPhone.

For web browsing, there's no doubt in my mind that a decent netbook would do the job. I have an Eee PC 900 series in the lounge room at home for just that purpose.

When one looks at the growth of mobile phone sales it's obvious that the fastest growing segment is the smartphone category. iPhones, BlackBerrys and Windows Mobile are no longer just for nerds. The technology has moved along such that smaller devices, while still requiring some compromises and changes in our behaviour, can do many of these tasks. They may not so them as well as we'd like but they do them either well enough or very well.

It's clear to me, and I suggest that sales figures strongly support this view, that while single function devices like the Kindle will continue to sell profitably but that they will only ever be niche devices. The vast majority of consumers will prefer to have a device that can do many things well rather than one or two things brilliantly.

The folks over at FileMaker have delivered one brilliant iPhone app. Bento for iPhone is an iPhone port of Bento - not some cut back imitation.

If you're looking for powerful information management on your iPhone then it's a no-brainer - buy Bento for iPhone. For $5.99, it can replace several other iPhone apps. Sure, there are a couple of rough edges but we're sure these will be sorted in the fullness of time.

My full review can be read over at Australian Macworld.