Praying daily for a special event with PrayerMate

We’re in the midst of university mission season at the moment here in Britain. Last week was the London-wide UCCF mission, this week it’s Imperial’s turn. It’s not uncommon that you have periods like this where you want to pray for something intensively, and then eventually whatever it is comes to an end and no longer needs that kind of focussed prayer (though of course it’s always worth praying for follow up after a mission!)

I’ve found PrayerMate really useful in my own attempts to pray for some of these missions, and so I thought I’d write up a quick tutorial on how to use it in this way.

Step 1: Creating a prayer card

Before we can do anything else, we need to create a card for our mission week. Tap the “+” button in the top left of the home screen. We’ll give it a name, “Mission Week”, and click the “Tap here to add details…” button as well if you want to type in a fuller description to guide your prayers.

 

Step 2: Praying for it every day

By default, PrayerMate will just show you a subject every few days, after you’ve finished praying through all of the other subjects in the same category. For our intense mission week, focus, we want to temporarily change this.

The easiest way I’ve found is to schedule it to appear every single day of the week:

Selecting week days

Tap the “Scheduling Mode” button, and select “Day of the Week”. When presented with a list of week days, tap each one until it is ticked. PrayerMate prioritises day-of-the-week subjects over those with a “default” scheduling mode, so this will make sure you’re almost guaranteed to see it each day from now on.

 

Step 3: Auto-archiving at the end of the week

Optionally, if you want, you can specify an auto-archive date at the end of the mission week. This will tell PrayerMate to move your subject to the “archive” once that date is reached. It won’t be deleted altogether, but it will mean that this subject won’t appear any more in any new prayer sessions.

Setting an auto-archive date

 

Have you got a tip or trick that’s helped you to pray using PrayerMate? Send it in to prayermate at geero.net or tweet @PrayerMateApp so that it can help other people too.

Announcing PrayerMate 2.1 – Attach PDFs and More

I am thrilled to announce yesterday’s release of PrayerMate 2.1 on the App Store. This is a significant new release with many changes, both visible and under the hood, as well as a significant number of bug fixes. Here’s a run down on some of the new feature:

Attach PDF Prayer Letters to Items

This was actually the idea that first inspired PrayerMate way back when. My inbox often seems full of prayer letters from mission partners, that if I’m totally honest I often just read once and then rarely look at again. Well, now if I open them up on my iPod using Safari, I can use the “Open with…” button to get them into PrayerMate and attach them to one of the items there. In a prayer session, when I get to that item, there’ll be a little envelope icon – tap that and it will open the PDF full screen, and I can zoom in, scroll around, etc. Hopefully in the future you’ll be able to import these from Dropbox too, but that’s a way off yet.

Support for iPhone 5

Inevitably I’ve had a few eager iPhone 5 users wondering when I would support the new bigger screen size, and now here it is. Sadly, because of the way Apple has organised things, this also means dropping support for the oldest (armv6) devices and iOS 3 – things like the original iPhone, as well as the first and second generation iPod Touches. This was a tough call, which is why I have deliberated for so long, but it looks like there are now very few users of these old devices, so if you’re one of them, I’m really sorry but I’m not sure I had much choice.

New “Menu” Card

I was a bit unsure about this one at first, but the more I’ve used it myself the more I’ve come to love this. Now when you start praying, before all of your actual prayer cards, you’ll see a new one labelled “Today’s Prayers”. This will list all of the items that will be prayed for in this new session.

A little tip on this: my wife finds it really helpful to close and reopen PrayerMate in order to take another peek at this card after she’s prayed – so that she knows if she needs to email anybody to get up-to-date information on how she can be praying. She finds it so helpful that I might see if I can incorporate this formally into the app, but we’ll see. If you think that would be useful – do let me know!

Day of the Month Scheduling

PrayerMate has long supported scheduling cards to appear on a certain date or a certain day of the week, and now you can schedule them to appear on certain days of the month as well (e.g. the 1st of every month, or the 15th and 30th).

Integrated Email Support

I’ve added two new features related to email.

The first is to let you email the person you are praying for from within the app. Often when you’re praying  for someone, it makes you really want to get in touch to let them know you were thinking of them. Now if you press and hold on the card, you’ll get an “Email contact” button. This will work for all subjects, but if you’ve explicitly linked it to a contact in your address book then it will be able to pre-fill the email address for you as well.

The second is to let you email the details of an item from within the app to anybody you like. I’ve started using PrayerMate to record my small group’s prayer points each week, and now once you’ve filled in the details, on the edit subject page there’s a button to “Email these details”, so I can send them to everybody in the group. Quick tip: set up a contact “group” in your address book (this needs to be done on Mac OS X / Windows and then synced across, I believe) – this at least let’s you quickly skim through each member of a group and easily select all of their names.

Bug Fixes Galore

But PrayerMate 2.1 wasn’t just all about adding new stuff, it also includes a significant number of little tweaks and bug fixes, largely based on the invaluable feedback of my wonderful users. If you ever experience a glitch, please don’t hesitate to get in touch, or even if you just have a thought about something that would make the app even better – there’s a “Send Feedback” button on the very final page when you’ve finished praying (the one after the blessing) and I read every email I get and I love hearing from people. PrayerMate is also on Twitter now: @PrayerMateApp.

Here are some of the fixes:

  • Fixed a problem on the “Edit details” page that made scrolling and editing impossible in landscape mode
  • When editing details, the cursor now defaults to the top of the card rather than the bottom
  • Restored some missing photos, and make sure they survive updates in the future
  • Addressed some problems with Dropbox import and export

Hubbub is Hiring Web Developers

In case you didn’t know it, London’s most amazing startup, Hubbub, is currently looking for two… yes TWO… web developers.

If you’re a developer who likes people and likes food, Hubbub is an awesome place to work. We let people shop online with local independent retailers, helping support local communities in the process. As an added bonus, that means we tend to have really incredible lunches here each day, with food bought from some really top-notch suppliers.

We use Ruby on Rails, but if your skills are in some other language then don’t panic – as long as you can demonstrate the ability to learn new things quickly, that needn’t be a hindrance (I’d only ever written about one line of Ruby before I started here).

As an added bonus, successful candidates will get a year’s supply of free bacon. And my, what bacon it is! Or maybe you’re not a developer, but you know somebody who is? Well, recommend somebody to us who we go on to hire, and you’ll get a year’s supply of free bacon too!

Full details and instructions on how to apply can be found here.