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