Wednesday, January 19, 2011

MPrayerTime, Now With Azan

Thanks to Mohannad's support, we were finally able to add the functionality most missed on the N900, the azan for prayers.
It can automatically play the azan, the iqama, and set your mobile to silent then back to general and you can control the times for every azan.
In this blog, I am going to explain the features and explain them. The older blog post that showed the features for the application can be found here.
Now the settings page has an extra tab called azan settings. It looks like the following:

- To enable/disable an azan you only need to toggle the corresponding button to enabled(blue) or disabled(grey).
- To set the time margin to an azan, set the value you need in the azan text box. Entering the value zero will make the azan play on the same time as the azan. Entering a positive value will make it play after the prayer azan time by the specified number of minutes. You can also enter a negative value to make it play before the prayer time.
- For the ikama, entering zero will disable playing the ikama. Entering a value will make it play with the time margin specified.
- For profile switching, to make the application set the profile to silent, you have to make the ikama play - i.e. you have to enter a value other than zero in the ikama text box. After the ikama window is displayed and closed, the profile will be set to silent for the number of minutes specified in the silent text box.
- For saving the whole settings for mprayertime just press the save button.

On the main window for the application, you have extra options:
- Check Alarm Times: You can use that to let the application show you the times when the azan(ikama) will be played for you.
- Test Azan: simply plays an azan for you to make sure that the setup is okay.


Issues:
- Sometimes, the azan stops playing on schedule:
     This is a bug that was noticed and will be solved in the next version. To solve it for now, all you have to do is to go to the settings and press save again. You can always check your azan alarm times as described before to make sure it worked.

Todos:
      - Allow changing the sound played in the azan.
   
The package now is in maemo's extras testing repository. To be able to install it you have to add the extra's testing repository in your application manager.
If you want this application to go to the extras repository all you have to do is vote for this application here (in the package karma part).

Hope you find it useful.
Thank you.