A company called SonRise Studios has released an iPhone app for the “Conflict of the Ages” series written by Ellen G. White, including the full books Patriarchs and Prophets, Prophets and Kings, The Desire of Ages, Acts of the Apostles, and The Great Controversy.
For the “Our Heritage” series I’ve been writing for 3ABN World, I wanted an illustration of Rachel Oakes Preston. Unfortunately, the best I could find was the one shown first, below. I don’t have much experience with traditional art (painting, etc.), so the best I could do was modify the image into what I wanted. The image shown next is the result after retouching in Photoshop.
It’s a struggle for the survival of the fittest — the fittest science for Seventh-day Adventist education, that is. Most SDA educational institutions (K–university) have taught, and presumably still teach, a literal six-day creation of life as taught in Genesis 1. However, over the last couple decades or so, some teachers at SDA universities have allegedly endorsed the historical interpretations of mainstream science, but while retaining some measure of divine oversight. This view is sometimes called theistic evolution.
Over the years I’ve heard reports of problems in our school science departments, but had always assumed it was a single rogue teacher here and there. From all that I’ve personally seen, the church leadership and its official publications have remained firm on the traditional Adventist view of origins.
The Ellen G. White Estate has not released a Mac application for searching Ellen White’s published writings for many years. In fact, they have never released one that runs natively under OS X. And because newer Macs no longer ship with OS 9 emulation, this means new Mac users (and probably most users in general these days) are left out in the cold.
Of course, using Apple’s Boot Camp, it is possible to install Windows on a Mac, and run the EGW software that way. But this involves tedious rebooting each time you want to switch to Windows. Or it is possible to run the EGW software under a virtual environment such as VMware Fusion or Parallels. And that is what I had been doing; it works, but it’s slow (open VMware, wait for Windows to awake, start the EGW software, which then runs a bit slow in the virtual environment).
The new 3ABN SonBeam Channel website has been launched. Not everything is working perfectly, but it is now much more functional than before. We will be doing updates over the next couple months to add features, iron out bugs, and bring in eye candy.