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Australian Daily Prayer now with Catechism

The time had come again for my apps to get updated to the latest minimal standard (targetSDK 34). While I was updating these libraries, I found an Australian Anglican Catechism called What We Believe (pdf). This seems to have been publish in 1985 and was brought about due to something passed in general synod in 1977 asking for a revised catechism for our context.

This is now a new menu item in the app. This new page then displays the whole 45 questions and answers. I know that it could be displayed better (likewise the 39 Articles) so that its not one very long page, but for now it is a start.

This new update had been pushed to the app store and should be updated soon. You can also download the APK from this site.

Australian Daily Prayer themes update

In preparing to be ordained, one of the tasks I need to do is to follow the Australian Anglican morning and evening prayers and lectionary for 30 days and reflect on this experience. In doing this, it means I have been using my app every day, and what has annoyed me during this process is there was one colour in the tabs that didn’t update correctly with the season (see pic below). So I have fixed that

While I was adjusting the theme, I also remembered someone at my church who used this app and they were having big display issues because they had night mode set. So I have also updated the night theme to make it a bit better, mainly on the About screen and the 39 Articles screen. This hasn’t been extensively tested, but it seems to work…

I have also updated the libraries and set the target SDK to be version 33, which should hopefully mean everything is more stable, or at least up todate.

This update should be pushed to the play store, and the APK can be downloaded from this site. (I have kinda given up on the Amazon store.)

Website/Australian Daily Prayer app back up (again)

For the last two weeks, all my ampers sites have been down, along with the Australian Daily Prayer app. This was caused at my hosters end, where they had two major server failures and then they had to manually restore everyone’s account.

I don’t pay for hosting, so on one level, I am grateful that they put in the effort in restoring all my data, even though they don’t get anything out of it.

This is the second major outage my site has experienced this year, the previous one was over SSL certs. I do hope this isn’t going to be a trend form my hosters.

Anyway, everything seems to be up and running again, thank you for your patience.

Website/Australian Daily Prayer app back up

About two or three weeks ago my website SSL certificate expired, which caused a “Not secure” warning to be displayed on all my sites and it also broke the Australian Daily Prayer app.

It tuned out that my free hosters had an issue with their LetsEncrypt process, so I tried a few things to get everything up and running again. I got a 90 day SSL cert from zerossl.com. This allowed my main site ampers.x10.mx to work. But that didn’t solve my Daily Prayer app issues or my subdomains.

I then tried to find a free wildcard SSL service (I found three different ones), but all of those required you to have access to enter a DNS TXT (entry which my hoster didn’t allow) or to place a file in a folder called /.well-known/acme-challenge. I found that I couldn’t place anything in the /acme-challenge folder as I would always get a 404. Again this was a setting on my hosters end.

Today my hosters got their LetsEncrypt process up and running again, which means I also got my subdomains and app back up and running.

Sorry to everyone for the downtime. I do this stuff as a hobby and because I am cheap I try not to pay for hosting or SSL certificates.

Australian Daily Prayer v3.0.0

For a little while, the Australian Daily Prayer app wouldn’t update the service content if you changed the date. The card at the top would display the right day and saint/festival, but the morning and evening tabs would still be displaying the current date. This bug turned out to be a relativity simple fix by changing the FragmentPagerAdapter to be FragmentStatePagerAdapter. However, I was already deep into readjusting the whole app to be running on the AndriodX libraries, which meant this fix got rolled up into a bigger update.

From the users perspective, not much will appear different (maybe the menu), but under the hood hopefully it will work smoother on newer phones (the last update was from October 2019).

There may be other bugs in regards to the content of this app, ie some days a Psalm doesn’t appear, or the readings might be a bit off, etc… That is more to do with the website it is pulling from, and not necessarily the app itself. I run that website, so the issue is still on me, but those content bugs may not have been fixed in this update.

Integration to the Inductive Bible Study app isn’t working, I think it may have to do with that app receiving requests from this app (which I probably forgot about it in the last major update). This may be a feature I will put back in.

You can get this update from the portfolio page and Play Store.

Australian Daily Prayer website fix

Since around mid December, my web hoster has been transferring their free sites from cPanel to DirectAdmin. In this process, it meant that the Australian Daily Prayer website, and by extension the app as well, stopped working.

Once I was able to log back in there was some subdomain permission settings and SSL certs that needed to be set up. It seems to be going ok.

I think there is a display bug in the android app, in that it doesn’t deal with you selecting any old date, as it will display the same readings and prayers for whatever the current day is. (The website allow you to go to any date). I will try and find time to tweak this.

This move also broke my New City Catechism and multiply subdomains, but they too are back up and running again.

Australian Daily Prayer – https fix

It seems that in my last update to get everything up to API 29, it caused an issue with the Australian Daily Prayer app. It turns out that from Android 9, by default http calls are blocked to encourage everyone to switch to https.

Now, after I released the previous update my Pixel 2 stopped working so while I am waiting for that to be fixed I am on my old Nexus 5, this is on Android 8. Still, today I tweaked the app, (assuming this was the issue), to make https calls to my dailyprayer website. Turns out I already had an SSL, so I didn’t have to tweak anything on the server, just the app.

I have already emailed all those who asked about the issue, and one person has gotten back to me saying it is now working on Android 9 from the Play Store. Hopefully, that is the new norm. APK on this site is also updated.

targetSdkVersion API 29 update – Australian Daily Prayer, mobile multiply, 321, Two Ways To Live & Who Will Be King?

Google has reset the minimum target for all of their apps on the play store. So today, since it was too cold to go outside, I thought I would re-roll a few of the easier apps in a new SDK. I also played with using Android App Bundles for publishing the final versions to the play store and I got to re-setup my development environment on my new PC.

The following apps now have a target for Android 10 (one version higher than the current minimum).

There are no visual improvements to these apps, which I think most of them now need. I would like to update them to a more material design (except for the Australian Daily Prayer app), but I do need to find that time. They also all have a swipe out menu from the left, and in Android 10 you can now make that gesture to mean “back”. Still, I was happy to see a few thousand active installs (devices online in the last 30 days) using my apps.

Hopefully, I will also get on and update my last two apps (OpenSpritz Bible and Inductive Bible Study). These ones are more functional than the others, and I do have more updates I would like to do. But the main issue is finding the time. Maybe we need more cold snaps.

Like always you can also find the updated APK files for these on this website.

Website and apps are back up

This website has been down for nearly a week, but today it came back up. I use a free web hoster so I really can’t complain too much, as you do get what you pay for. While waiting for this to come back up I did set up a new account with another free hoster and was seriously considering moving everything off this site to them. That would mean a fair bit of re-setting up (emails, web apps, domains, app updates etc), so I am kinda glad I didn’t have to do that.

The Australian Daily Prayer app is dependent on this site to pass the readings and prayers of the day to it. This meant that for the last week the app has been broken, displaying a connection error. Thank you to those who emailed me to let me know that the app wasn’t working. As you can see now, this site is back up, and so is the app.

Australian Daily Prayer app re-published

Just after Christmas, I received an email telling me that the Australian Daily Prayer app had been removed from the Play Store because it was in violation of their metadata policy. The email didn’t say exactly where I was in violation, so I didn’t know exactly what I should change. One of the issues could have been excessive detail – even though they give you a text box that is allowed 4,000 characters!

Anyway, in my description I removed the list of features and a few days later (without notification – would have been nice for them to also email me to say it was back) I saw that the app was republished in the Play Store.

Here is the offending text which seems to have violated the metadata policy:

Features:
– Defaults to the morning or evening service based on the time of day
– Displays the Common Worship translation of the Psalms for group readings and defaults to the main Psalm of the day
– Displays the ESV text of the readings for the day, including the mp3 download link
– Displays the festivals and daily saints and the collects on the appropriate days
– Colour scheme changes depending on the church season
– Can jump to any date
– Displays the 39 Articles
– Swipe from the left of screen to open up the menu; or press the button on the top left
– Integrates with the Inductive Bible Study app