Many of you are aware that I don’t get paid for ministry work, I am what I like to call, full time volunteer. Yesterday I made a promo video for the iPhone app I work on that pays the bills. I did the soundtrack in GarageBand, great for quick little beats.

If you are interested in downloading the app we have a full version and free version on iTunes. Free version has static instead of animated radar, doesn’t let you set any radar options (transparency, speed), doesn’t let you drop pins on the map to get weather in precise locations and only lets you save 2 favorites. Go for the paid!

I recently downloaded the Tempo iPhone App for $0.99. It has quite a few features for a little 99 cent app. When you first launch the app you see this screen:

First impression is not that pretty of a UI. Color scheme isn’t my favorite, not soft on the eyes. But they do present you with all the basic functionality you’d expect out of a click generator. You can set your time signature, beat type, volume controls and setting the tempo either through tapping or explicitly setting the BPM. The tapping feature seems a little sensitive, but after a while you can get the tempo average to mellow out and give you a decently accurate setting.

The only other screen available is the settings screen:

The Animate Meter Change is kind of a worthless setting. Just turns off a very brief animation when switching time signatures. Play mode is pretty cool. Overlay mode allows you to play a song from your iTunes library and run the App on top of it. So you can tap out a time to a song in your library. That’s pretty darn handy. Sound set just changes the audio that’s played for the click. Digital is the best sound they have I think. The bummer with the drum kit sound set is they don’t offset high-hat and snare based on the time sig. Both high hat and snare just play together on every beat. That’s not really what you want when using a drum kit click track. Tuner feature is kind of nice, just plays the note tone. Maybe in a pinch it could be handy. Would be much better if it read tones from the mic of course.

The biggest annoyance with the app is stability. You can make it crash every time if you start the click track, then navigate into settings and change some setting. So they have some work to do on bugs. Practically I think the best uses I see for it now is tapping out tempos in your library and having a portable click track for rehearsals and laying down scratch ideas. Here’s the final score based on a 5 point score, 5 being the best and 1 being the worst.

Appearance: 3

Features: 4

Usability: 4

Price: 4

Stability: 2

Overall: 3.4 / 5

This week we launched the Our Rising Sound podcast which will contain all of our video/audio content, this so far includes interviews and worship loops. You can click the link on the right sidebar to subscribe to it in whatever podcast client you use. If you are using iTunes you can subscribe with iTunes. So subscribe if you’d like and spread the word.

As many of you know John Mark McMillan performed at our church, Life Connection Church in April. He was nice enough to sit down with us for a good long conversation. This video is just part 1 of our conversation. John Mark is an amazing guy and had a lot of great insight into music and worship. You don’t want to miss any part of the interview so make sure you subscribe to the rss feed to keep up to date when we release the other portions of the interview.

Also We’ll be doing a little giveaway here. The prize is John Mark McMillan’s cd “The Songs Inside the Sounds of Breaking Down” on iTunes. So you will get the album gifted to you over iTunes. To enter into the giveaway you need to so 2 simple things:

1. Link to this post on some other site. Could be your own blog, could be a digg submission, delicious, Facebook, you get the idea. All those nifty links are at the bottom of this post.
2. Comment on this post with a link to where you mentioned this post.

That’s all you have to do. I’ll let the competition run for 2 weeks. Now onto the video…

See also Part 2.