Archdiocese of St. Louis' New iPhone App
There's plenty of posts about this already, which I won't repeat here, instead, read the reports below:
And, straight from the horse's mouth, here's the app's page on the Archdiocesan website.
This iPhone App kind of snuck up on me from under my radar; I was in the middle of two rather large projects in the Archdiocese of St. Louis, when I thought "Hmm... I've wanted to try my hand at an iPhone App for some time. Maybe the time is right!" After a few long nights, a few condensed weekends, and some work hours here and there, I've finished work on what I hope will be an inspirational app.
Not inspirational in the sense that people feel moved to prayer, or feel closer to Christ—no, that's not really the purpose of this app. Rather, inspirational in two ways:
- In helping people utilize the sacraments.
The main feature of this app (indeed, it launches straight into it!) is the parish mass/confession/reconciliation time discovery interface. It's so easy to simply find Mass times (or other sacrament times) with this app, that nobody has an excuse for missing Mass if they have an iPhone and are physically able to move about. - In getting more (Arch)dioceses on board with new communications initiatives.
I'm hoping that this will be a benchmark app against which other (arch)dioceses can compare their own efforts in the mobile, 'just-in-time' area. Our parishioners deserve to have the information they need to help them in their faith lives—and they need it in their pockets!
At some point (maybe sooner rather than later), I'd like to open the code, maybe stash it on Github, and help other Catholic organizations make use of it (to whatever extent possible) for their own needs.
I'd also like to have an Android app for the Archdiocese, but so far I've not had the impetus (either from myself or from others) to do so. Read more of my thoughts on Android dev (as it stands now).
Perfect, the app is not. But I'm already tagging and working on a few bugs I've found in the version on the App Store right now, and I'm working on sync so the iPhone will always have the latest parish event time information. You can follow more of that development here.
Do you have any good ideas for further development? Any further integrations you see as necessary? Let me know in the comments!
Want to see what this is all about? If you have an iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad (this version isn't optimized for iPad yet), download Catholic STL for free.