Great Commission Video
Instead of you | Great Commission from Evangelical Alliance on Vimeo.
christmas great commission micro blog
Simon Smailus
Instead of you | Great Commission from Evangelical Alliance on Vimeo.
christmas great commission micro blogI recently received an email from Cocoatech about their new version of Pathfinder. I’ve bought a couple of previous licences so thought I’d give it a go. First however, I thought I’d check out the upgrade price. I have v6 and v8 has just launched. Guess what, no discount for v6?! I would have thought being a customer and having purchased previous copies of Pathfinder would have at least meant something to Cocoatech, but no, it seems not.
Cocoatech are not the only ones to do this. Many companies especially those moving to a subscription model leave their old customers in the dust. Then there are those who say, unless you upgrade in the first week you won’t get an upgrade discount, Ulysses where a good example of this only offering their discount for a very short period. If you where on holiday, it was tough luck!
All of this leaves a bad taste in the mouth. I have no desire to support developers, who really care so little about previous customers. The old saying is applicable:
Vote with your feet
I’m doing just that, I’m adding Cocatech to the list of companies I will not purchase software from in the future.
software tech micro blogIn attempting to make our design requirements easier and faster we signed up to Canva. This has not gone well. The interface is clunky, unintuitive and awkward to use. In hindsight, this should have been obvious from a web app. Web apps are never going to live up to proper desktop applications, especially where design, fonts, and colours are involved. Secondly, CMYK is non-existent. The app tells you it is not really needed for print, but that is really poor advice. Most print houses print CMYK and the design needs to be rendered CMYK. Canva does send you to some third party site where you can convert you image’s colours model, but this is not adequate in my opinion for good quality CMYK. Finally, much of the design elements require purchase. The free ideas and templates are very limited.
In conclusion, I have been creating my graphics using Affinity Designer (£48.99), using Pexels for images and I have an array of fonts on my desktop. My designs are done in half the time Canva takes and changing the colour model is a breeze. I love the idea of Canva, but find it’s implementation is way too slow for my liking.
canva design tech micro blog“Ever since I became a Christian I have thought that the best, perhaps the only, service I could do for my unbelieving neighbours was to explain and defend the belief that has been common to nearly all Christians at all times.”
—CS Lewis1
Mere Christianity↩
“…no outward instruction, even from Christ himself, or his words in holy scripture, can bring us the true and full blessing, till the Holy Spirit works in us.”
—Andrew Murray1
Absolute Surrender↩
Over the years my process for preparing messages has changed. Prayer, reading the Bible and reliance on the Holy Spirit are my mainstays in this process. However, I have found Andy Stanley’s process (I’ll probably post something more definitive on this at some point) helpful in making sure I’m simple and asking the right questions1. I tend to use Scrivener for my preparation and below is the template that I use which you are free to download and use.
This does not mean I agree with everything he says!↩