Batoul Apps

I'm happy to announce the release of Guidance 1.3. This release was made possible by the excellent code contributions of Mahmood Ali, jazakAllahu khairun for your help. This release includes the ability to change the volume at which the adhan is played. It also now shows the Hijri date in the drop down, you can customize the Hijri offset in the advanced settings to match your local moon sightings exactly. The last feature included in this update is the Sparkle updater, this last feature you probably won't notice until the next time an update is released, but then when it is, Guidance will automatically download and install the update by itself!

Eid Mubarak to everyone! Alhamdulillah on this joyous occasion I am able to announce the release of the next update to Guidance. This release includes some features that have been requested for some time now, the ability to select a different adhan for each prayer and the inclusion of a fajr adhan (one that includes the line "Alsalatu khairun min alnawm").

With this release out inshallah I'm going to try and finish up the update for Guidance Mobile and also release Quran Reader for the iPhone (which is very close to completion). After that, once I can get a minute to work on Guidance again the next features I'm looking at adding are the ability to wake the computer up from sleep to play the adhan, an automatic updater (one that downloads and installs the update for you), and some usability improvements to the manual time adjustments. If you guys have any other features you'd like to see please include them in the comments.

A minor update to Guidance for Mac OS X was released today, this just fixes a small bug that caused the countdown to display 60 minutes instead of an hour causing cases like -1:60 to occur instead of showing -2:00. This release also includes the newly created Venezuela time zone of -4:30.

What a better way to start Ramadan than with a new version of Guidance with some great new features. The most relevant feature is being able to have Guidance play the Adhan a certain number of minutes before Fajr. This is great for letting Guidance wake you up for suhoor or some Qiam ul-layl. You can also choose to use an audio file of their own as the Adhan, in case you have an Adhan thats cooler than Yusuf Islam. Users also have the ability to choose a different time zone from the system time zone in case they want to get prayer times for a location other than their own. Another big feature is the set of pre-defined calculations you can choose from. I felt this was more familiar and easier to understand for most people than choosing the sunrise and sunset angles, however if you prefer to customize your own sunrise and sunset angles then thats available as well. There's also a handy little help button next to the calculation methods and clicking on it provides a description of the different methods and some tips on how to choose the correct one.
 
One thing I'm extremely happy to announce is that Guidance is much more stable, no more crashing for higher latitudes. Not only that but it correctly calculates prayer times for the highest locations you can think of.
 
Inshallah it will not be another year before the next release. I already have some features I would like to implement, such as the option to have Guidance pause iTunes when it starts playing the adhan and a calendar that shows you the Islamic date and prayer times for that date. Also, I'm really sorry that Arabic localization did not make it into this version, I was rushing to finish it in time for Ramadan, so that will definitely go into the next version.
 
If you notice any problems with this release or have some suggestions for features please leave a comment or contact me.
 
Ramadan Mubarak!

A lot has been going on personally, but the 1.1 release of Guidance is steadily getting nearer. I'm happy to say that an Arabic translation will be included in this release thanks to the assistance of Rayyan Faris. I've also been working on fixing a fairly critical bug which causes Guidance to crash for people living at high latitudes (such as Norway and Sweden). Right now I am just finishing up including the translation and some more testing and then will be releasing the new version very soon.

InshAllah I do plan on adding a feature that will allow Guidance to wake up your computer for Fajr, however that won't be until a later version. In the meantime there is a way for you to manually set your computer to always wake up at a certain time. So what you can do is set your computer to always wake before Fajr (something early like 4 am) and then you don't have to worry about putting your computer to sleep at night. Just go to System Preferences, then go to Energy Saver, then click on schedule and check the start up or wake choose everyday and set the time. I would like to thank user Saad for pointing out this tip to me.

Work is steadily being made on Guidance 1.1. As you can see from the screen shots below, one of the features in Guidance 1.1 is a unified location field. This will help alleviate a lot of the problems I think international users are having and becoming confused what to enter for state and so forth. You will also be able to see the new feature of being able to select your own adhan file.
 
So far all the features I mentioned in my earlier post (see "The Status of Guidance")are slated for this release except for an Arabic version. My Arabic, while fluent, is not good enough for translation. If anyone would like to volunteer to translate Guidance into Arabic please contact me. Also, automatic update installation (using Sparkle) is on the fence as to whether or not it will make it into this release or the next one.

First off, I would like to apologize to everyone who has been waiting for an update to Guidance. I've been busy in the last month or so writing the Prayer Times web app for the iPhone and playing around with the newly released iPhone SDK in preparation for developing Guidance Mobile.

However things are now back on track for releasing Guidance 1.1 which brings me to the topic of this post. Getting the prayer times just right. No matter how many cool features you put into a prayer times application, the one feature that has to be perfect is calculating the prayer times correctly (this of course being the point of the application in the first place).

Well, to be honest, the amount of attention Guidance has received is both very surprising and very pleasing. To date, Guidance has received over 6,000 downloads. Since the initial release of version 1.0 (which was hurriedly followed by version 1.0.1 the next day to fix an embarrassing time zone bug that affected everyone east of Greenwich), a lot has happened. I got married and Matt graduated from college, so the project had to be put on hold until everything settled down again. Now that things have settled down, I'm eager to get back to working on Guidance and release version 1.1, which should include some cool features and a more organized code base to make updating Guidance easier. Some of the features currently projected for version 1.1:

• The ability to select an audio file from your computer to use as the Adhan (mp3, m4a, wav, etc.)
• Tahajud (night prayer) option, similar to the shuruq option, that lets you set Guidance to play the adhan a set number of minutes before fajr to wake you up for Tahajud. This feature should be quite useful in Ramadhan so you can wake up for Suhur.
• The ability to set the prayer time calculation method for Fajr and Isha separately
• Updater will now automatically download the new version and install it for you
• Arabic version!

For the long term, I hope to eventually implement the following features:

• Ability to wake the computer up from sleep to play the adhan
• Ability to set adhan volume separately from the system volume (actually more complicated than it sounds, trust me)
• Continued localizations for different languages (if anyone would like to volunteer their services as a translator please let me know)

Thank you everyone for all the donations and emails, I love hearing from people who enjoy using Guidance, it really makes my day. A big thank you to abdullafx for the awesome thread he posted on macarabia.net (http://macarabia.net/showthread.php?t=5592).