First off, I would like to apologize to everyone who has been waiting for an update to Guidance. I’ve been busy in the last month or so writing the Prayer Times web app for the iPhone and playing around with the newly released iPhone SDK in preparation for developing Guidance Mobile.

However things are now back on track for releasing Guidance 1.1 which brings me to the topic of this post. Getting the prayer times just right. No matter how many cool features you put into a prayer times application, the one feature that has to be perfect is calculating the prayer times correctly (this of course being the point of the application in the first place).

Now this is sometimes difficult to do since there no hadiths giving us the equation to use. In fact, the different madhhabs have different standards, which in turn have different calculation methods based on location. So without going too much into the technical details, what I (and the majority of prayer time calculation programs) do, is use a universal equation and then allow you to somewhat customize it to your location and madhahb by changing the way Asr is calculated (for those who follow Hanafi) and by changing which angle to use for the sunrise and sunset.

One mistake I believe I have made is by forcing you to select Fajr and Isha settings together. While this works great for most of the madhabs, there are some that have these angles different. Inshallah one of the features of the new version will be the ability to separately select an angle for Fajr and one for Isha. I will also include all the different angles that any madhab uses, giving the user the ability to customize their prayer time calculations just right for their location.

It’s also important to mention that because Guidance (like all other prayer times application) uses a universal calculation algorithm, which works well for the majority of locations, but sometimes even after adjusting the Fajr, Asr, and Isha settings you will notice that the prayer times are off by a minute or two from what the local Mosque uses. Theres really no way to see which time is more correct as these can depend upon many different factors, but the right thing to do is to follow the prayer times of your Mosque, and to help you do this while continuing to use Guidance I am also adding a feature that will allow you to set a prayer times adjustment. This well let you add or subtract a set number of minutes from a prayer time to help you sync up Guidance perfectly with your Mosque.

One thing you may notice about Guidance thats different from a lot of prayer times applications is that when you choose your prayer times calculation method, you are asked to choose an angle instead of picking a method from a list such as University Of Islamic Sciences, Karachi or North America. I really find these names to be ambiguous and can often be misleading. There are many people in North America that don’t use the methods that fall under the “North America Method”. Instead, I think that a user should be able to know exactly how their prayer times are being calculated and customize it to fit their locality as much as possible. The only possible downside is that picking an angle may leave some users confused as to which one is right for them. The way I would hope that most users set their prayer times is to keep on changing settings until the prayer times in Guidance are as close as possible to the prayer times at their local Mosque, and Allah knows best.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 27th, 2008 at 2:34 pm and is filed under Guidance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.