When I first went full-time on PrayerMate back in 2016, one of the very first major projects I tackled was to implement data syncing between devices. I hated every minute of it, and whilst the implementation mostly worked in most situations, there was a frustrating number of edge cases where it failed fairly spectacularly in unpredictable ways. It was remained one of our biggest sources of bug reports ever since – but, until now, it has seemed an impossible problem to untangle. Where do you even begin, trying to approach a problem like this?

Our old sync implementation was built on top of Firebase Real-time Database – something that was never really intended for our use case. We had separate native implementations on both iOS and Android, which was another major source of bugs, due to minor discrepancies in how they were implemented. I also often felt hampered by our commitment to building an app that could be used completely offline, and that supported anonymous usage where none of your data was synced to the cloud.

Then we discovered PowerSync. PowerSync describes itself as a “local-first” sync engine. It had a Flutter API, meaning that we could build a single implementation that worked across both iOS and Android. And it was completely designed with our use case in mind – building apps where the local database was considered primary, that worked fully offline – but then syncing that data to the cloud.

Our experience with PowerSync has been incredibly positive. They have an amazing array of demo projects that helped us understand how to implement many of the different use cases we wanted to support. Their customer support has been exceptional, answering any of our questions promptly and thoroughly. They also have an active Discord server where we could get help when we needed it.

But most importantly: it just works. When you add data on one device and see it appear on another, it really is magic. It also supports attachment syncing, and we’ve been able to rig up the same solution for data encryption that we had running in our old system too. Of course there’s been a HUGE amount of work dealing with all of the edges cases (what happens when you sign in for the first time, what happens when you sign in on a second device or an existing account, what happens when you sign out, and so on and so on…) and we have still not yet managed to reimplement ALL of the functionality of the old app in the new system (“Groups” support being the most obvious omission right now) but we are getting there, little by little, and the systems that we HAVE rebuilt feel a lot more robust and more intuitive to use.

In terms of getting up and running, I would say the biggest pain point was having to set up our own PostgREST server to sit between the app and Amazon RDS, but I understand that PowerSync are working on a simpler solution to this. In general we have been very impressed at their rapid rate of development – whenever we have identified a missing feature, we find they often get around to implementing it so quickly that the solution is often in place before we even get to the point where it was actually a problem for us.

So, if you are trying to implement an app with offline capabilities and want a way to reliably sync your data between devices, I highly recommend trying out PowerSync.

Last month we had a major milestone in our project, The Serpent & The Seed, exhibiting it at our first secular games conference, PocketGamer Connects London 2024. The project has always mainly been about engaging people who don’t normally read the Bible, so it seemed important to get out there and test it with the general public and see how people responded to it – and I was blown away at the reaction, and how much people seemed to enjoy it. We always knew we were building something pretty special, but it was such a confidence booster to see other people recognising that too – and especially when its people from the games industry who really know their games.

I put together this devlog video sharing some of our experience:

With that shot in the arm for our confidence, it’s enabled us to go out there and hire an extra team member – a Technical Artist, to help us make the game look even better, adding lighting, writing shaders, and so on. It really feels like things are starting to come together now, and I can’t wait to see how it develops over the course of this year.

For the first time in 11 years, this summer I had the great privilege of attending the Christian Game Developers Conference in Los Angeles, California. It was a fantastic opportunity to meet other likeminded people, show off our latest demo of The Serpent & The Seed, and to benefit from the immense collective wisdom reflected by that incredible community.

It was especially helpful for us as a motivator to get Act 2 of the game into a playable state, and particularly the Abraham and Moses sequences. Here’s a little devlog video sharing something of what we accomplished, by God’s grace:

We recently got back from a conference in Wales where we demoed a small slice of Act 1 of The Serpent & The Seed. I’m so encouraged by the response it received, so here’s a little video about how we got on.

This video also serves as a bit of an announcement that we have now launched a crowdfunding campaign to get the rest of the game built. We have some “matched giving” lined up, so for every £1 you give, we get £2 towards the project (or £2.50 if you’re a UK taxpayer and can Gift Aid!) – so even the smallest gift can make a big impact. If you’ve been following my 18 year journey of trying to make a Bible video game, or if this is the first time you’ve heard about it, I’d love you to consider making a contribution – even if it’s a small one! (I’d far rather have 16,000 people giving £1 each than two people giving £8,000 each!) Donate today at https://discipleship.tech/serpentseedgame

How many years have I been working on this crazy “video game that helps people explore the Bible” idea now – seventeen?! Today we took one more step along the road with the public release of our teaser trailer. The team did such a great job with this – enjoy!

My kids and I played through Return to Monkey Island and the verdict is in: it is GLORIOUS!

Here’s a couple of videos I made. First is what my kids made of it after playing through the prologue:

Here’s my fuller response after completing the game:

Recently we held the first Kingdom Code UK meetup in two and a half years in central London. We were discussing together the topic “Is technology good?”. Here’s a quick video giving a flavour of what it was like:

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Almost 17 years ago, I developed this passion for making a mobile game to help people explore the Bible. It sort of went on the back burner when PrayerMate came along, but my interest has recently been rekindled, and over the past few months God really seems to have been at work as this new project has come together remarkably quickly.

It’s in the very early stages but I delighted to announce The Serpent and the Seed – a Bible Overview mobile game experience, working with some amazing collaborators. I’m so excited to see where this leads in the coming months!

After I graduated from university I spent a wonderful year in Fowey, Cornwall, working for Philip de Grey-Warter. For issues of conscience, after many years he has recently made the costly decision to resign from the Church of England and started a new church plant in Fowey, The Anchor. If you are ever in Cornwall and looking for an evangelical church, you would do well to pay them a visit.

What better reminder to have sitting on your desk at work that a PrayerMate “Time to pray?” mug. Or what could be a better way to focus your morning than having Philippians 4:6 ringing in your mind over breakfast?

Get your PrayerMate mug now and a small percentage of each sale will go towards helping fund future development of the app too!

• US store
• UK store
• Australian store
• Canadian store

I’m absolutely thrilled that last night PrayerMate won the Premier Digital “People’s Choice” Award. Of all the categories it could have been shortlisted for and ultimately went on to win, I think the People’s Choice couldn’t have been more fitting, since at the end of the day it’s PrayerMate’s wonderful community of users who, under God, are really the cause of its success – and of course who I make the app for! Thank you all so much for your support (and your votes!) and keep those feature requests and bug reports and general feedback coming!

It’s been a big year for PrayerMate, passing the 100,000 download mark, raising over £9,000 through a crowdfunding campaign, beginning the process of being translated into other languages, and now winning this award, but at its heart it remains a little app to help you pray, and my prayer is that this award simply means that it can reach, and thus help, a wider audience.

Have you ever had that thing where you’re taking tea and coffee orders after a Bible study, and before you know it you’re running out of fingers trying to keep tabs of decaf coffee and peppermint tea and normal coffee and water and… well, it’s hard work, isn’t it?

I’d like to commend you a beautifully simple little iOS app that’s available for free on iPhone: Countin’. It gives you a grid of customisable counters that simply count up or down as you tap them. Simple!

It’s by a young man called Matthew Spear who I had the privilege of hanging out with at the Code for the Kingdom hackathon last weekend, and I know he’d be really chuffed if a few people downloaded it (and if you were feeling really generous you’d send a couple of quid his way by hitting the In-App Purchase – unlocking various colour options and feel-good vibes!)

Get Countin’ here.

Fancy a year’s free bacon?

Hubbub.co.uk is growing – and we’re on the look out for front-end and back-end developers. Not only is it a fantastic place to work doing great work, but we’re also offering a year’s worth of free bacon to anybody who we successfully hire – or who recommends somebody to us who we go on to hire. So even if you’re not a developer yourself, it’s worth thinking if you know anybody who is.

All the details, including instructions on how to apply, can be found on our Developer website.

Just before going on holiday a couple of weeks ago, I got a little email in my inbox that indicated my blog had been hacked (a “you just reset your password” warning). A quick look around the FTP server soon confirmed this.

By God’s grace I spotted it almost immediately and was able to lock the intruder out and get things back to a vague semblance of normality. Today is the first day that I’ve got things to the point where I can actually post new blog posts. Maybe one day I’ll even get around to customising the theme from the default one (if you’ve been wondering why the appearance changed, this is why).

Let this be a lesson to you: always keep your WordPress installation fully up-to-date. It may be a hassle (and these days it’s not even that much hassle!) but it’s a lot MORE hassle to have to reinstall from scratch.

Have you heard about WorshipGOD UK, a new national worship conference that is taking place in the UK hosted by Bob Kauflin and Sovereign Grace Music?

The conference will be held on 5th-8th March 2014, at The Forum, in Bath and host by Bob Kauflin and Sovereign Grace Music. It’s a 3-day event on the theme of “Called to be Faithful” – the idea being that as pastors, leaders, worshippers, musicians and singers, we are not called to be famous or successful, or to put a primary emphasis on being creative, cool or impressive, but faithful. “We will explore what it means to be faithful to receive God’s grace, be faithful to proclaim his Word and gospel, be faithful to serve our local church with the gifts God has given us, be faithful to grow in musical skill, be faithful to prepare people for suffering and death.”

Sounds like a really good thing to me, and an event that I hope will be a real blessing to the church.

The conference will have loads of main sessions and seminars that promise to be “packed with both theological truth and practical instruction”. Speakers include Bob Kauflin and some Sovereign Grace guys (Craig Cabaniss and Jeff Purswell), as well as Mike Reeves, Tim Chester, and Donald Whitney, so it ought to be fantastic. Worship leaders and musicians will include folks from Sovereign Grace Churches in the UK and USA, as well as guests including Stuart Townend and Nathan & Lou Fellingham, and others.

All the details for the conference are on the website. There’s a full list of speakers, seminars, schedule, lodging info and costs. You can follow them on Twitter (@WorshipGODUK) or on facebook.

My wife was trying to sync her data from her old Android phone to a Google account so she could transfer them to a new Android phone. Whilst trying to add her Google account to her old phone, she kept getting this error message:

Can’t establish a reliable data connection to the server. This could be a temporary problem or your SIM card may not be provisioned for data services. If it continues, call Customer Care.

Annoying, huh? Search the internet and you get forum thread after forum thread of people having the same problem over years. Many people seemed to suggest that the only solution was to do a hard factory reset, losing all of your data in the process which totally defeated the object!

Hilarious, then, to discover this super simple solution:

“Just try signing into the YouTube app with the account you want to sync and it will automatically add it to the list of your accounts. Kapish!”

Sure enough, that instantly fixed the problem in a matter of seconds. Amazing!

I’m going to blog this so that I don’t have to work it out from first principles again every single time I want to convert an EPS file with a transparent background into a PNG whilst preserving that transparency (you can export EPS files to PNG on a Mac simply using Preview, but annoyingly it always gives them a white background).

You’ll need to install ImageMagick (which you can do simply and easily on Mac OS X using Homebrew). Then simply run a command like this on the terminal:

convert -density 400 -colorspace rgb TransaprentBackgroundEPS.eps -transparent white Output.png

The important bit here is that the “-transparent white” bit comes AFTER the name of your EPS file, not before.

The only case where this doesn’t work (which may well be a very important case, depending on the image) is if the image itself has white in it. In those cases the white bits will disappear – as was the case for me with the PrayerMate logo I was trying to convert.

Edit: if you’re having colour issues when going from EPS to PNG, try using “-colorspace srgb” instead

Where can you find a gluten free pasty in Cornwall?

When you go to Cornwall, it is mandatory that you eat a pasty. That’s just the law.

But what happens if you are wheat or gluten intolerant? Where can you find a gluten free Cornish pasty in Cornwall?

When my wife and I went on honeymoon to the Lizard last year, it just so happened that the first cafe we stumbled upon sold excellent gluten free pasties. It’s called Harbour Lights in Coverack, and they also do gluten free cream teas. Their full gluten free menu can be found on their website. We went back again this summer and they’re still going strong.

When I was about fifteen years old I wrote a little computer game called “Shrapnel”, based on the popular tank game Scorched Earth. Even now, all these years later, I still get the occasional person asking me about it, so this page exists for their benefit. I’ll update it with more content soon.

Multiple select fields are those little boxes that contain a number of options, of which you can choose as many different rows as you like. However, they’re notoriously confusing to use if you’re not sure what you’re doing. As an example of what I’m talking about, have a play with this one, and see if you can figure out how to select just the first and the last option:

The first optionA different optionYet another optionThe last option

If you found that straightforward, then you can probably stop reading, but if you found that a struggle, or if you’ve ever written a web page for people who would have found that non-trivial, then hopefully this short guide will be of some use to you.

Selecting a single row from a multiple select is easy – you just click on the option you want, and it highlights it whilst deselecting any previously selected rows. Almost as easy is selecting a few consecutive rows – click on the first row you’re interesting in, then hold the SHIFT key and click on the last row you’re interested in, and it will select those rows and all of the rows in between.

Where the multiple select field gets a little tricky is if you want to select rows that are not next to each other. To do that, hold the CTRL key (or the command / cmd key if you’re on a Mac) and click on some rows. CTRL-clicking on a row will toggle its selected status – selecting rows that were previously unselected, or deselecting rows that had been selected already. Using CTRL-click allows you to select as many or as few options as you like – including unselecting all of the rows, to say “none of these options” apply. Try it again now, using CTRL-click to select just the first and the last option, and then deselecting them again.

That’s all there is to it, really!

Somebody recently forwarded me an interesting post by Andy Harker on the symbolism of the bitten apple, often associated (at least in Western art and advertising) with sin, even a celebration of sin, and elicit pleasures, especially sexual.

“Do you see the great irony? The apple is not the forbidden fruit but the life of Christ. To eat the apple is not sin but salvation – the banquet of grace. How perverse we are to use a picture of Jesus as an advert for sin, to call good evil and evil good, to confuse the tree of life with the tree of death, to think that Jesus has come to steal and kill and destroy and the devil has come to give fullness of life when the little-know truth is the very reverse. Christ is the apple tree.”

Read the full article here.

Why Jesus is My Hero #40 of 52

Real life is hard work. It’s full of ups and downs, and sometimes the downs are really down. Even when life is up we’re good at filling it with worries and anxieties about the fact that it might not stay that way for long, and that a down might be just around the corner.

I think many of us probably long to be the kinds of people who are better at rolling with the punches. The Bible talks a lot about the importance of “steadfastness”, which amongst other things conjures up images of not being discouraged when things don’t go your way – of standing firm whilst the waves crash all around you. But how do we get that way? How do we remain steadfast amidst the disappointments and challenges of daily life?

I’ve said before recently that I’m increasingly seeing the importance of joyfulness in life – and I think that for the Christian person, an attitude of joy and thankfulness is one of our key weapons in the fight. But how are we to remain joyful and thankful when tragedy strikes? How do you rejoice when you lose your job, or when you’re anxious about money or about your health?

It doesn’t completely answer the question fully, but one passage that I think is really helpful in thinking about this is Philippians 3. It’s one of the go-to passages on joy in the Bible:

“Finally, my brothers, rejoice in the Lord. To write the same things to you is no trouble to me and is safe for you.”

In other words, Paul is saying “I might as well tell you to rejoice, even if I’ve said it a hundred times before – I love talking about joy, so it’s really no trouble for me, and it’ll be really good for your souls, so hopefully you’ll not get bored of me banging on about it.”

Philippians is a letter written by Paul as he’s languishing in jail, so it’s somewhat surprising that he should be so focussed on rejoicing. So what is Paul’s secret – what is it that enables him to be rejoicing in the midst of his suffering? “Whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him”

For Paul, the gospel is THE number one most exciting thing in his life. His relationship with Jesus Christ is more precious to him than absolutely anything else. He’s so excited about the fact that he gets to spend eternity with Jesus, that absolutely everything else seems irrelevant by comparison. Stuck in jail because he’s a follower of Jesus? Totally worth it – he’s got an eternity of true freedom to look forward to. Hated by his fellow Jews because of apparently turning his back on the law? Who cares what men may think of him, when the creator of the entire universe loves him? Poor and destitute and whipped and beaten and shipwrecked and generally looking like a failure by the world’s standards? Hardly worth batting an eyelid over, given the heavenly riches he has to look forward to in the New Creation.

You see, when you recognise the immense value of the one thing you DO have, you start to care a little less about all those other things you lack. When Jesus becomes supremely precious to us, we find ourselves enabled to rejoice in the midst of all kinds of difficult circumstances. So long as our saviour is with us, our first love, we can accept a little temporary suffering and hardship – especially knowing that He is ultimately in charge and will not permit anything that isn’t for our eternal good.

I really hope and pray that you will find grace to rejoice and thank God for the gospel in the midst of whatever you’re going through right now. God is a good and loving Father to those who trust in him through Jesus Christ. I don’t know what you’re struggling with right now, but I do know that he’s promised to bring us to be with him if we’re Christians, and live with him in a world free from the sin and suffering that so mars this world.

“But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself.”

Now that’s something to rejoice in!

My flatmate Dave has started writing an excellent and thoroughly enjoyable blog and if you have any sense you will read it.

Dave is attempting to blog about the world from a Christian perspective but for a target audience of people who don’t consider themselves to be Christians, which means it’s a good read for anybody and everybody, and is bound to give you food for thought. It’s also just a lot of fun.

Dave’s a classically trained musician with a great love of power ballads and Disney movies, currently working as a computer programmer. He is also generally a stand up chap and I am very thankful to God for him and my other flatmate Paul, who doesn’t currently have a blog.

Why Jesus is My Hero #38 of 52

I’m not always great at having quiet times, and sometimes when I’m struggling to muster enthusiasm I like to try and dip into one of the Psalms as something slightly gentler. This morning I was reading Psalm 57, which I found really encouraging.

Psalm 57 is described in the headline as “A Miktam of David, when he fled from Saul, in the cave.” In the rest of the Bible it’s generally worth mostly ignoring the section headers, since they’re added in later by editors who are trying to be helpful but are often simply misleading. But in the Psalms those introductory sentences are genuine originals, and often give important contextual information. In this case, it’s a Psalm written by David – the one who would go on to be one of Israel’s greatest kings – but it was written before he was crowned, whilst his predecessor King Saul was still on the throne. Saul was a jealous man who viewed David as a threat to his power, and he spent much of his latter years chasing down David and trying to have him killed. The fact that this Psalm was written in the midst of that, whilst hiding from Saul in a cave, gives real poignancy to David’s words. This was no idealistic daydreaming from someone who fancied himself a bit of a poet. This is the outpouring of a heart right in the thick of it.

So it’s amazing how utterly God-focused it all is. If I were hiding in a dingy cave from a murderous tyrant I’d be full of talk like “what are you doing God?! Get me out of here, now!!” Instead, David’s longing remains firmly fixed on seeing God’s name glorified: “Be exalted, O God, above the heavens! Let your glory be over all the earth!” (v5)

David is utterly confident that he can trust himself to God and that God will do what’s best. “God will send out his steadfast love and his faithfulness!” (v3) God’s love and his care are utterly unwavering – and he has the sovereign power to back up his good intentions to. Hence the note of confidence behind David’s prayers: “I cry out to God Most High, to God who fulfils his purpose for me.” (v2) Whatever the outcome, David knows it will be for the best. It won’t necessarily be comfortable and straightforward. It certainly doesn’t mean that Saul gets struck down dead in an instant so that David is safe again – it took many years before Saul’s rule came to an end. But it does mean that David could trust God to care for and provide for him.

And ultimately, David’s heart is not about his own safety, but about God’s glory. He knew that God’s motive in caring for him and protecting him was not first and foremost so that David would feel better. God’s primary motive in acting on his behalf was so that David would have cause to praise Him – so that God would get the glory. David so loved God that he longed to see God’s name exalted – for his glory to be over all the Earth. He longed to have a better reason to praise God’s name – to have yet another story to tell around the camp fire of God’s grace and provision at work in his life. A right concern for God’s glory gave him the strength to persevere through suffering in the present without descending into grumbling and despair.

Yet as you read Psalm 57 you can’t help but feel echoes of another king in David’s line who was also pursued to death by his enemies – the Lord Jesus.

“Be merciful to me, O God, be merciful to me,
for in you my soul takes refuge;
in the shadow of your wings I will take refuge,
till the storms of destruction pass by.
I cry out to God Most High,
to God who fulfils his purpose for me.
He will send from heaven and save me;
he will put to shame him who tramples on me.
God will send out his steadfast love and his faithfulness!
My soul is in the midst of lions;
I lie down amid fiery beasts–
the children of man, whose teeth are spears and arrows,
whose tongues are sharp swords. ” (v1-4)

As Jesus hung on the cross, surrounded by those who hated him, despised and mocked by all and sundry, he was able to entrust his soul to his almighty Father. He endured the cross because ultimately he valued God’s glory above his own comfort. His desire was not to be spared pain, not to be immediately rescued, but to see God’s name exalted above the heavens. That might seem like a cold and dispassionate concept, except that God’s glory is bound up in our good – God is glorified as we have cause to praise him. And three days later, as Jesus was resurrected from the dead, he had some pretty serious reasons to praise God!

I found myself really challenged in the way that I think about my life, and about prayer. How much do I really value God’s glory above my own ease and comfort? How confident am I that God will work all things for my ultimate good, even if it hurts in the short term? I pray that my heart will be changed, and that as someone who is united to Jesus I’d be able to pray with that same sense of confidence: “I cry out to God Most High, to God who fulfils his purpose for me.”

Be exalted, O God, above the heavens! Let your glory be over all the earth!

Hi George,

I’m off to Paignton in Devon this evening to get involved in a little mission week organised by Great Parks Chapel titled The Y Factor. Five of us from the Cornhill Training Course will be going down there and doing a few talks each during the week. I guess that probably means I won’t be posting many (if any) blog posts during the week.

People have been complaining for months that they couldn’t comment on my blog, but now Facebook has made it easy with a really easy-to-setup Javascript widget. So no more complaints! If you’re reading this from the homepage, you’ll have to click through to the individual blog post by clicking on it’s title.