The last few weeks have revealed what an incredibly engaged and passionate user base PrayerMate has – if I ever doubted it for a second! The response to the new PrayerMate v5 has generally been extremely positive, but inevitably with such a big change it has also revealed a few problem areas. Today there is an incremental update in the form of v5.1.0 (5.1.1 on Android) which includes three key changes:
- A critical bug fixed – unfortunately a particularly thorny and hard-to-detect bug slipped through the net in the initial release of PrayerMate 5 that meant all “never-prayed-before” subjects were fixed at a relatively low priority (equivalent to something you prayed for 12 hours ago). The result of this was that if you came back to the app after 24 hours had passed, you’d only ever see things that you had prayed for yesterday – which needless to say was not what you wanted. I take issues like this extremely seriously, since it damages the relationship of trust that you have with the app, and I am very thankful for those of you who brought this to my attention.
- Explicit priorities on each subject – something that I have been wanting to add for an extremely long time is the ability to set a “priority” level on specific subjects. Now through a subject’s “settings” page you can set the priority level: normal (the default), low (this subject is five times less likely to show up), high (this subject is five times more likely to show up), and importantly, every time. The “every time” setting means that this subject will always appear in your prayer session – although for those of you who use PrayerMate more than once per day it can also be combined with the existing “scheduling mode” setting e.g. to make it appear every time on Mondays only.
- Request “all” subjects from certain lists – with PrayerMate v5 came the option to manually request a specific number of subjects from each of your lists, but sometimes you don’t know in advance how many subjects you want. In this new update, you can go one step further and request “All” subjects from a given list every time.
This Lent why not get the 40acts feed – 40 days, 40 meditations. You can use the new “Every time” priority setting to get it each day.