PrayerMate v4: Syncing, Take Words With You and more

Today I am pleased to announce the release of PrayerMate v4 for both iOS and Android, a substantial new update. Here’s an overview of the new features.

Automatic syncing via Dropbox

feature_syncThis release is the culmination of almost two years of work implementing automatic syncing between devices via the Dropbox Datastore. If you have, for example, an Android phone and an iPad, you can now keep all of your PrayerMate up-to-date between the two. Even if you’ve only got the one device, you might find this a convenient way to keep your data automatically backed up in the cloud so that you can access it again should you lose or update your device.

To enable syncing, tap the cog button in the app, go to the “Advanced settings” menu, and switch on the “Sync with Dropbox” setting. You’ll be given the choice of “merging devices” or “wiping local data” – this lets you say whether you want to keep the data on your current device or not (sometimes when you sync two devices, you want to treat the other device as the “master” copy, and throw away the data on the current device – other times you want to combine the data that’s on both of them).

Visual prayer galleries

The downloadable prayer gallery (accessible by pressing the cog button then “Download prayers”) has been upgraded so that when a choice of prayers is available you can now swipe left and right between the different options, before hitting the “Download” button in the top right. It makes it much easier to find and choose the prayers that suit you.

Praying scriptural prayers

The Psalms: new “Praying the Bible” feeds

The latest version of PrayerMate contains two exiting new features to help you pray scriptural prayers. The first is two new feeds based on Don Whitney’s new book “Praying the Bible“, published by Crossway, both of which help you pray some of the Psalms each day. The first feed gives you five Psalms every day, so that over the course of a month you will have prayed through the entire Psalter. Recognising that this is probably a bit much for most people, there’s a reduced version of the feed that gives you just one Psalm each day, so that you will pray through them all every five months.

“Take Words With You”

iOS Simulator Screen Shot 28 Jul 2015 21.58.52 The second extremely exciting new feature is the integration of the brand new 5th edition of Tim Kerr’s excellent manual for intercession, “Take Words With You“. Take Words With You is an amazing body of work, collecting together 2,500 Bible verses into categories, to help use them in prayer to God. The fifth edition contains a five step method to help use the scriptures in all of our prayers – and this forms the basis of a new “prayer builder” tool in PrayerMate.

Now whenever you are editing a subject in the app, you can hit the “Take Words With You” button to help you decide how to pray. Select a verse for each of the five steps (confess sin, praise God, pray the promises, pray scripture prayers, pray faith affirmations) and PrayerMate will then combine the results together for you.

Here’s a little walkthrough video:

Category images

You can now assign a default photo to each category, which will apply to all subjects in that category unless you explicitly override them. This also has the nice benefit that the default categories that PrayerMate gives you when it is first installed can have some images, to give the app a bit more colour:

default_categories

Premier Digital Awards

If you live in the UK, would you consider nominating PrayerMate for the Premier Digital Awards? The nomination form is here, the category you probably want is “Christian Mobile/Tablet App of the Year”

About PrayerMate: PrayerMate is a free app on iOS and Android designed to help you pray more faithfully and more widely. More details can be found here.

Hubbub is hiring!

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.

My blog got hacked

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.