Three Seventh-Day Adventist Media iPhone Apps Review
Ever since I posted my blog post of “Five Free iPhone Apps for Seventh-Day Adventists”, I got a significant number of visitors to this blog from search engines. Though I don’t want to make a quick conclusion, it somehow means that there are a lot of SDA who are curious about what kind of apps related to the church are available in the iTunes store.
In this blog post I’m going to review three more SDA apps that are specifically related with the information media.
1. SpiritRenew
Last week I received a blog comment from Rich DuBose regarding the SpiritRenew app that he mentioned is produced by the Pacific Union Conference. So I immediately downloaded the app and see what is it about.
The app basically contains Christian articles and stories that covers a lot of topics from career to the women’s world. It is interesting to note that the website version is called AnswersForMe.
One major drawback of the app is, it cannot run offline. It seems that the app doesn’ download the articles and thus it requires internet connection to run it.
2. Spectrum
by: Association of Adventist Forum
Spectrum is the iPhone app for the Spectrum magazine. If you’re not familiar with the magazine, it worth to check their website here.
So what’s good about the app? It’s just a simple app to read the blog posts and articles in the west from the iPhone, nothing really fancy. However it downloaded these articles whenever we access them for the first time, so we still can read these articles offline.
The bad sides? Some of the app features are not working yet (the Cafe Hispano and SS Lesson) and it seems that the app is really at an early stage of development, hopefully we’ll see some updates in the future.
3. iRecord
by: Seventh-Day Adventist Church (SPD) Limited
iRecord is the iPhone app of the Record magazine, the official news magazine of the SDA in the South Pacific Division.
This application looks a bit more sophisticated that the previous two apps. It enables us to read the blog, watch videos, and read the latest issue of the magazine.
The good? It also downloads the articles to the iPhone so it doesn’t require constant internet connection to run. It’s also more colorful and interesting to see compared to the SpiritRenew and Spectrum.
The bad? For a reason that I cannot understand, the picture of each articles takes almost half of the the screen and it stays there when we scroll down the article, as if the screen size is not small enough.
Another thing is, the magazine issue is not optimized to be read in a mobile device. I notice some loading time overtime I scroll to read the magazine. The problem that is caused by the large size of the magazine PDF file (~7.1 MB).
Conclusion
I’m really happy to see there are more SDA appestat have been developed for iPhone and Android. I hope we will see a lot more interesting apps in the future.
All of these apps are all free and they are worth to have if you have iPhone or iPod touch. Have a great time playing around with these apps and God bless! 😀