I've been toying around with the idea of creating an application for the iPhone for some time now. I just needed a good idea. Lately, I've been thinking of how people have so many devices/things in their pockets, and sometimes people don't want to carry a rosary with them when they have phones, iPods, wallets and other trinkets taking up valuable pocket space.
For these Catholics (myself included), I'm working on 'iRosary' (that might not be the final name, as someone else has gone that route already):
It's the iRosary—the Rosary for people on the go. For the first beta release (which I hope to have out sometime in Fall 2008), it will be ready for people to start praying the basic mysteries of the Rosary and the Chaplet. However, there are a ton of features that I hope to be including in the future including:
- Meditations (spoken or written) for each mystery of the Rosary; possibly spoken by different people (selectable by the user).
- A 'Prayer-Tracker,' which tracks how many Rosaries you've said and/or allows you to write in intentions for future Rosaries (because there's always something to pray for!).
- A function that allows you to not have to look at the screen at all to pray the Rosary; it would use the motion sensor and the vibration feedback features to allow you to pray even more meditatively.
- Different sets of images for meditation during mysteries of the Rosary (including stained glass, paintings and etchings).
Like I said, I'm in the early, early beta stages... I'm still trying to freshen up my coding skills to write in the Objective-C language for this app—and even when that's finished, I need to still wait for the iPod/iPhone App Store to get on its feet. My projection for a 1.0 version of this software is August 2008 at the earliest, and December 2008 at the latest.
And I'm sure you'd want to know about pricing... well, I'm not looking to make any profit, so if anything, it might cost about $1.99 or so, just to cover any development costs; any profits would likely be donated to the Seminary or another worthy organization.