austraLasia #3090
Shake & Pray! Make your
Smartphone your
Prayerbook
BOLTON: 21 June 2012 -- Swatch & Pray, Shake
&Pray ....
Don Bosco Publications, UK, has an almost Ubuntu-like cycle of
agile
development. What will they come up with next? Battersea
boy
(though he now lives in Bolton) Fr Tony Bailey doesn't let his
74 years
stop him from being an active Salesian in today's digital
playground.
Indeed, quite the opposite - he is something of a 21st century
trail-blazer in this regard.
As the ideas man behind DBP, Tony asked
himself
"Where are young people today?" and came up with a pretty
obvious
answer from simple observation: "They are on the phone"!
But not
just any phone. The Smartphone is the new playground today
and, he is
betting, tomorrow. Salesians need to be there. That doesn’t
mean of
course that every Salesian needs a Smartphone – apart from the
expense,
that phone would be their playground rather than one
belonging to
young people. But it does mean that Salesians need to find a
way to
have a presence in this new playground of young people, to
have a
virtual presence there.
And for Tony, it seems that one of
the best
ways to have a presence there is to create apps (an app is an
application that works on an iPhone or an android phone; there
are
about a million apps available).
Accordingly, the GB province has now
made its
first attempt to enter this new playground with an app called
Shake & Pray.
Based on its very
popular Swatch & Pray,
it
effectively converts a Smartphone into a prayer book. It
offers 60
screens with a reflection, a graphic, and a prayer on each
screen.
Shake
&
Pray can be used in two ways; you can shake the
Smartphone and
get any screen at random, or go to the Contents screen and
choose your
favourite prayer.
And where do you get it? For the
iPhone app
you need to go to the
iTunes Store, while the Android app is available on the
Google
Play
site