InshAllah I do plan on adding a feature that will allow Guidance to wake up your computer for Fajr, however that won’t be until a later version. In the meantime there is a way for you to manually set your computer to always wake up at a certain time. So what you can do is set your computer to always wake before Fajr (something early like 4 am) and then you don’t have to worry about putting your computer to sleep at night. Just go to System Preferences, then go to Energy Saver, then click on schedule and check the start up or wake choose everyday and set the time. I would like to thank user Saad for pointing out this tip to me.

Work is steadily being made on Guidance 1.1. As you can see from the screen shots below, one of the features in Guidance 1.1 is a unified location field. This will help alleviate a lot of the problems I think international users are having and becoming confused what to enter for state and so forth. You will also be able to see the new feature of being able to select your own adhan file.
 
So far all the features I mentioned in my earlier post (see “The Status of Guidance“)are slated for this release except for an Arabic version. My Arabic, while fluent, is not good enough for translation. If anyone would like to volunteer to translate Guidance into Arabic please contact me. Also, automatic update installation (using Sparkle) is on the fence as to whether or not it will make it into this release or the next one.

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).

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Well, to be honest, the amount of attention Guidance has received is both very surprising and very pleasing. To date, Guidance has received over 6,000 downloads. Since the initial release of version 1.0 (which was hurriedly followed by version 1.0.1 the next day to fix an embarrassing time zone bug that affected everyone east of Greenwich), a lot has happened. I got married and Matt graduated from college, so the project had to be put on hold until everything settled down again. Now that things have settled down, I’m eager to get back to working on Guidance and release version 1.1, which should include some cool features and a more organized code base to make updating Guidance easier. Some of the features currently projected for version 1.1:

• The ability to select an audio file from your computer to use as the Adhan (mp3, m4a, wav, etc.)
• Tahajud (night prayer) option, similar to the shuruq option, that lets you set Guidance to play the adhan a set number of minutes before fajr to wake you up for Tahajud. This feature should be quite useful in Ramadhan so you can wake up for Suhur.
• The ability to set the prayer time calculation method for Fajr and Isha separately
• Updater will now automatically download the new version and install it for you
• Arabic version!

For the long term, I hope to eventually implement the following features:

• Ability to wake the computer up from sleep to play the adhan
• Ability to set adhan volume separately from the system volume (actually more complicated than it sounds, trust me)
• Continued localizations for different languages (if anyone would like to volunteer their services as a translator please let me know)

Thank you everyone for all the donations and emails, I love hearing from people who enjoy using Guidance, it really makes my day. A big thank you to abdullafx for the awesome thread he posted on macarabia.net (http://macarabia.net/showthread.php?t=5592).