Batoul Apps

Salaams,

I have a feature request that I thought up the other day...

Could Guidance have the option add each prayer to iCal, so it show up as an event/task please?

Praying regularly is a new and challenging thing for me. I run guidance on my iPhone to see when the next prayer is but I still forget it. I wanted some way for the prayers to come up as reminders (so an alarm sounds etc). Then it dawned on me that if Guidance could insert the prayer times into iCal then these could be synced into the iPhone to provide me with a event "reminder" for each prayer. On my desktop it would then remind me in addition to Guidance but this small caveat I could live with (double reminder at home is worth it for a single reminder on the road).

Maybe the insertion into iCal could be based on a subset of the daily prayers, or weekdays only, reminder 10mins before, in a separate calendar (called "prayers") etc

Please let me know what you think of this idea, of if you know of any other way to make the iPhone give me an active prompt that its prayer time. I've made a small donation to your work, but please dont feel this mean I expect you to implement my idea.

May Allah reward you for all you hard work...
Nawaz

Salam Nawaz,

Thats a really great idea for getting prayer reminders on your phone. This very issue has been difficult to solve in Guidance due to Apple's refusal to let apps run in the background. Apple also doesn't allow apps to create alarms in the clock application (which was my second choice) however what I'm thinking I could do is provide a webpage that would allow you to enter in your location and prayer time settings and then based on that let you download an iCal file that you could import into iCal with all the prayer events.

Yep I was aware of the background issue and my first thought was as yours to use the alarms. However a little browsing around soon meant that wasnt an option. Hence the iCal idea. Mine is synced to a google calendar so I was trying to find a prayer google calendar to subscribe to but failed miserably.

Your idea of doing it via a downloaded file will no doubt please all the windows user out there (who I presume would find some way to get it into outlook - and hence their iPhone or whatever other phones they use I guess).

However how often would you need to do this? My worry being that if the calendar had too many events (five per day for a whole year) would it slow down the iphone. Conversely if it was too short a time period then it would be a chore after a while. If possible if Guidance (the desktop app) could do this in the background then it would be seemless.

Anyway, I look forward to any solution you do manage to implement. I think I really got to get back into programming, what language is Guidance written btw?

Thats a good point, another issue is that once the prayers are imported how would you get rid of them if you didn't want them anymore? Say you imported an entire year's worth of prayer alerts, thats a lot of alerts to manually delete. Unfortunately this issue would also exist if it was Guidance that exported it as well, unless I wrote a giant iCal syncing backend that could selectively add and remove prayer alerts from iCal. That, however, would severely take away focus on the main objective of Guidance. I'll have to look more into the iCal syncing API and see how easy some of this stuff would be to implement. Guidance is written in Cocoa/Objective-C.

Hmm, good point! I was thinking that if you synced it to a particular calendar (say called "prayers") then you could just delete the entire calendar then when Guidance next did it sync it would restore it from that day onwards. Ofcourse, Guidance could delete the calendar as a whole too I guess before add more prayers from "today" for the specified time period (1 day, 1 week, 1 month etc) onwards.

Having had a little think, maybe your idea would appeal to those who dont run Guidance on their desktop (though its free so its not like it would be a money making scam expecting people to run it).

Assalamu Alaikum Brother Amier,
Very Glad to see you continuing with your great work.
I was recently thinking of a feature that you can add to guidance. the feature is simple and it is to play morning/evening azkar half an hour before shrouq/maghrib. Other then that how is the arabic going?

JazakAllah Khair
Rayyan

Morning and evening adhkar would definitely be a great feature. Do you have any good adhkar audio files I could include?

I have really been slacking on including an Arabic localized version and really need to get going on that, thanks for the reminder.

Assalamu Alaikum

I like the idea of morning/evening azkar.. sounds good! I was wondering how difficult would it be to add a feature that pauses or stops things like itunes or quicktime or vlc? Its not exactly a neccessity as a feature but it would be nice to pause any video or audio playing in the background so that the azaan can b played on its own. Oh and im happy to hear your next feature addition is waking a mac from sleep to make azaan. Thank you for your hard work and may Allah reward you abundantly for whoever benefits islamically from your software

Wslm

Truly a fantastic app. I wish there were more like it. The only additional feature I would love to see would be the inclusion of Shia prayer times. Will this be in the next version?

Zahir,

Guidance can now pause iTunes if you check that preferences, but unfortunately I cannot pause all apps as I do not know which apps people might be using. I can look into also pausing Quicktime as well, as that may be possible too.