![]() This version is the official prayer book of the Catholic Church, however, it is suitable for all Christian faith traditions. ![]() If you are unable to pray in community, but love the contentment of praying with others, a praised feature of the Divine Office App lets you view locations where other Christians around the world are simultaneously praying with you. Oh and just because I am rather picky app-wise I was also annoyed that the title of the apps as it appears on iOS is the same icon and title as the previous version.The Divine Office App is an opportunity for you to participate in the recitation of the Liturgy of the Hours, an ancient and meditative collection of psalms, hymns and scripture that represent the public prayer of the Christian community. WiFi only should be the default and since this is buried in a setting some people might get a nasty surprise regarding their cellular download cap. Unfortunately it defaults to using both your cellular connection and WiFi. You can also select to have this download on WiFi only. This is important if you are on travel when you less likely to have access to a reliable WiFi connection. A default of seven days which can be decreased or increased up to 21 days. ![]() Since this audio must be downloaded there is a setting for how many days you want downloaded at a time. ![]() Adjusting the playback speed corrects this for me. While I did enjoy the audio versions the length of them could be quite lengthy at times. For example now you can change the playback speed along with skipping forward and back easily. Playing back the audio versions of the various hours has been totally revamped. It has also been updated to fit the new larger iPhones. Unfortunately the iPhone version still scrolls the page. Regardless it make the app easier to use. I am not sure why they didn’t do this before since Apple has APIs to fairly easily access the same libraries as used in their iBooks app. What I like most is that on the iPad you now have regular pages that you turn instead of the continual scroll. I think the design is a little overblown as I am preferring the more flat design pattern as in iOS7/8. The user interface is familiar as it follows the skeuomorphic design pattern of mimicking a physical book along with giving a patina of an old book. It is now a much better app and one that I will probably now use daily as they have really added some nice new features. The main reason I am writing this post is that recently they have released a new version of the app Divine Office 2. Still mainly I used Universalis for my daily reading and switching off to the Divine Office app for a change of pace or during octaves when Universalis got repetitive. I mainly used this feature at times when driving and it was nice to hear a community of people singing the psalms along with professional recordings of the hymns. It has a very unique feature in that in addition it has audio versions for all the hours. The daily experience was rather seamless where you are not concerned about downloading the texts for the day. It was much like iBreviary as it used scrolling text and also used the official text. At $13.99 now it is still a solid choice and is available on iOS and Android.ĭuring my year using an Android phone I start looking at apps again and at the time the Divine Office app was semi-affordable and so I bought it. Very well designed with some attention to detail. On the plus side the app has been continually updated with changes made on phone software updates to match the user interface. My only annoyance with the app is that the text used is not the same text as in the official 4-Volume set and the selection of hymns is repetitive. It also had options such as what translation of the Psalms to use. It was also superior since instead of just scrolling the text you turned pages which was much more convenient. So for some years I have been fairly happy with Universalis as no daily text update is required. This changed when I got the first iPad and Universalis was the only Liturgy of the Hours iPad app at the time. I had been interested in the Universalis app, but at almost $30 dollars at the time I stuck with iBreviary. While good enough I was never happy with the daily update mechanism and the app itself has not been updated for a year and a half. The original entry in this field was iBreviary by Fr. Ever since I abandoned the 4-Volume set of the Liturgy of the Hours for mobile app versions I am still always on the prowl for newer apps and updates.
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