I should have posted this a long time ago. I played with this again tonight and it is really, really neat. Love the new interface for everything and very excited about where this is going, especially the “Tools for your Calling.” There are so many possibilities here, and tracking stuff online can make it so much easier to pass onto others in the future.

Some New features (from Joel Dehlin)

* Great new search (try out the facets!)
* Prophets and Apostles Speak Today
* Church News and Events
* Church Organization
* Temples
* Humanitarian Service
* “Our Heavenly Father’s Plan”
* New e-store
* New Ward Calendar (with Google Calendar integration) and Ward Directory
* My Notebook (this is amazing and will sync with your mobile device in about a month or so). To try it out, login and go to scriptures or general conference. When you mouse-over a paragraph, you can tag and mark stuff and type in your own notes.

You can read the article from Joel at the link below. Go and check it out. I think I read in the forums somewhere that the church is looking at a January 1, 2011 launch date for taking over the main site.

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Three recommendations for iPhone genealogy apps:

- Reunion App
- GedView
- FamViewer

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Thanks to a post on ldstech forums I saw there is a new version of the lds catalog online. Check it out!

http://store.lds.org/

You can see the post at the link below.

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There was a great post last week on the LDS Tech Forums asking about some current technology statistics. The following came out of the post that I thought were great:

“New FamilySearch has over 760,000 registered users. That figure comes from Elder Allan Packer of the Seventy, you can hear this one and more at lds.org, go to Serving in the Church, then Family History, and look for the talk given April 26th. It’s in video format, .wmv.

FamilySearch Indexing said a couple weeks ago they are on track for having 200 million names indexed by the end of the year, about the end of June they said that about 345,000 indexers have done just over 100 million names so far this year.

lds.org gets about a million unique visitors a month. mormon.org has been increasing in traffic even before the rollout Thursday of the new version, no firm figures but that is also in the hundreds of thousands, and both sites are among the top sites among religious pages on the Internet.”

“For Facebook stats, lds.org has over 300,000 fans, and there are pages for each of the magazines, the Youtube channel, and others. Some of them list the other pages on the left and you can see the number of fans each page has at the moment by visiting those pages.

Mormon Channel has 43,100 fans as of this moment. Among religious broadcasters that have a Facebook page, it is in third place for stations, and third place for owners.”

You can read the whole post at the link at the bottom of this article. What other cool technology stats do you know about the church? Any lds.org folks here that can shed light on the current state of things, especially with all the recent new websites, and mormon.org relaunch?

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I still think this is the best LDS iPhone and iPad app out there. They have a ton of content, and their unique Tab feature and highlighting makes gospel study the best technology scripture study I have ever experienced. I can have the PDF from institute open in one tab, each of the standard works open in other tabs, as well as scripture helps in other tabs. Highlighting and adding notes to the scriptures as I learn. It really is amazing! Finally technology is enabling better scripture study than I can get on my own.

The one feature I still want to see is a simple notepad in one of the tabs, and the ability to easily add scriptures and passages to the notepad when building out a topical study, or in preparation for at talk.

You can check out the latest version release at the link below.

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This is an old site that is being revamped and updated (http://mormonlifehacker.com). Great content a lot like MormonTechie. If you subscribe here, you should go and check out this site.

They are also on twitter @ldslifehacker. (they friended me there @mormontechie… that’s how I found them).

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I love Randy Glasbergen cartoons! He just posted a bunch of his Angel comics. Many of them don’t have anything do to with Angels, but they are good for a laugh, and maybe even a spiritual thought every once in a while.

You can see his comics at the link below.

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There was a very good post recently on Facebook that suggested we create a Facebook app to encourage younger people to do some name indexing. For those not familiar, you can download an app that lets you go through census and other data and digitize the names and data so they can be searched. It really is an amazing tool.

Although the thread, and idea, was kind of torn apart, I think it is a fantastic idea! What a great way to spread the work. Not only through service applications like indexing, and the new picture service opportunities, but also to encourage more general official lds applications.

Maybe scriptures in facebook, that easily allowed you to annotate and SHARE!

You can read the original thread below!

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The church has two new sites to help youth track their Duty to God and Personal Progress goals.

http://dutytogod.lds.org and http://personalprogress.lds.org.

Right now they are more informational, but they are working on making them much more interactive for the youth. The link below is a tech forum asking for an update of when they might be available. it might be a good one to bookmark if you are a youth leader and check back on occasionally.

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The new Mormon.org was released last night and it looks great! I went in and found my profile by doing a search for tech in the blank field that lets you narrow things down. Below is a link.

I also took the chance to share my profile on facebook so all my non LDS friends can read a little bit more of why I am Mormon. I think the church should add some features that allow people to easily see and share their own profile.

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