Tuesday, February 28

How To: Portable Prayer Times

A long time ago I used to enter all Ramadhan Iftar times into my phone. Although this sounds tedious it wasn't that bad and was more convenient than carrying around a piece of paper. When I got a PDA I found a nifty little application that calculated times for any day of the year. Even better. However I stopped carrying my PDA a while ago and ended up with the same problem that I had before. Fortunately, technology had moved on by then.

Although you can get numerous Java apps for your phone that do the same thing, I've found an easier way to carry prayer timetables, using your phone's built in calendar. For this you need:

  • A PC running MS Outlook.
  • A mobile phone, with a calendar that you can synchronise with your PC.
  • Prayer Times 2003, a plug in for Outlook that generates prayer appointments. It's available here.

The rest is pretty self-explanatory after getting the plug in. Unzip and install it to get a Prayer Times toolbar in Outlook. This allow you to generate, remove and adjust the plug-in preferences. These provide a way to change the fiqh, alarm settings and other options used to generate the prayer appointments in the calendar part of the main application.

Once they're in Outlook, it's just another step to synchronise the calendar on your PC with that on your phone. Unfortunately every phone is different so I can't really describe how for each but I have got the whole thing working for a K750i so you know what to aim for. If you need any help, mail me and I'll try to have a look.

2 comments:

  1. oo this sounds good.

    ReplyDelete
  2. im downloading it right now..might help me.

    ReplyDelete