PrayerMate is my app for iPhone and iPod Touch that is designed to help you stay faithful in prayer for the people and causes that matter to you. Today a new version went live on the App Store, version 1.3. It adds a couple of new features that I’m really excited about: scheduled prayer requests, and auto-archiving.
Scheduled Prayer Requests
Each day PrayerMate will pick a selection of prayer requests from your library for you to pray through. Traditionally it just picked whichever subjects you haven’t prayed for in a while. But we all know that there are certain things you just want to pray for at specific times – maybe you want to pray for the Sunday service every Sunday morning, or you want to pray for your friend on the morning of their job interview.
PrayerMate 1.3 allows you to do both of these things using scheduled prayer requests. When you enter a subject, you can choose the “scheduling mode”: either “Default”, which behaves as normal; “Day of the Week”, which lets you pick one or more days of the week on which you wish to pray for this subject; or “Date”, which lets you pick a specific date from a calendar.
For those who want to go a bit deeper into how it works, here are a few of the under-the-hood details: every day, PrayerMate will begin by looking for dated requests scheduled for today (e.g. 20th February). If there’s any space left for extra requests, it will then proceed to look up requests scheduled for the current day of the week (Monday). It will then fill up any remaining allocation using unscheduled requests, in the same order as they’ve always appeared. It’s your responsibility to make sure you don’t have so many dated or “day-of-the-week” requests that there’s never any space left for unscheduled requests.
PrayerMate gives you a little bit of flexibility on dated requests – if you don’t fire up the app on a given day, any scheduled prayer requests that you missed will show up for up to a week afterwards.
Auto-Archiving
A related for separate feature is “auto-archived” prayer requests. Very often we want to pray for things which are time sensitive, and which cease to be relevant once a particular date has passed. With the new auto-archiving feature, you can tell PrayerMate to automatically move a subject to the archive after a certain date.
For example, if your friend is on a short term mission trip until Friday 16th March, create a new subject with 16th March in the auto-archive field, and on the 17th that subject will automatically get moved to the archive so that you no longer see it.