With technology moving so quickly these days, people start to question, "Is it too fast?" Yet, with faster technology come faster applications, which can be used to capture the new generation of faith.
These days, Christianity and television have formed a close-knit bond. On a given Sunday, one can find bible studies or praise hours being shown across many local channels. After attending Sunday Service, Christians can now go home and continue a full day of worship even at home.
Now computers are taking Christian television to the next level.
For a few months now, Microsoft has had an application called in conjunction with their popular operating system called Windows XP Media Center Edition (MCE). MCE works much like TiVo or ReplayTV, however it is simply software that goes with your computer.
TiVo and ReplayTV are what are known as Personal Video Recorders (PVR). Basically, it is a box that connects to your TV and has advanced features to record your favorite television programs anytime during the day and replay them back. You can program it to record certain shows anytime and play them back with even skipping commercials and other things.
MCE records TV easily like this. In fact, it seems even more advanced because of the wonderful design that it uses. Walter Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal said, "The interface is handsome and clever."
Besides TV, MCE provides many more features.
One of these features is an easy to use music player interface to listen to your favorite gospel songs. Also, if your songs are stored in hard to find places, MCE provides an advanced search feature.
One last feature is the pictures viewing feature. More than just showing pictures, because the computer is connected to the television, it allows you to view the pictures on the TV. MCE provides a slide show feature to do this.
All of these features are perfect for the modern Christian. Coming in after Sunday Service, many would like to continue the holy day afterwards. Replaying sermons, singing songs, or viewing great pictures can let you complete a full day of faith. Media is can take faith to the next level.
MCE does have some room for improvement. Even with fast processors these days, Intel's Pentium 4 processors at over 2 ghz can barely handle the load. With other applications running, the computer can freeze up due to the heavy decoding load when recording video.
But this is still a step in the right direction for faith and technology. "Hopefully this will be the first of many steps in reaching this idea of digital convergence," popular tech reviewer Anand Lal Shimpi said about MCE in a recent review (www.anandtech.com).
Technology is moving faster and faster in this computer revolution. Christianity is moving well with it. As Christianity and technology move together, people of faith everywhere can come together.
By Walker T.
