I first made the New City Catechism (NCC) Android app back in June 2013. I think it was first called Weekly New City Catechism. It basically displayed a simple webpage that I had made which had all the NCC questions displayed in a responsive way. The main reason I made this app was because there wasn’t one available. I also liked the idea of showing the current question for the week. I figured the reason there were 52 questions was because of the 52 weeks in the year.

In December 2013 the executive director of The Gospel Coalition (TGC) got in contact with me and wanted to see if this app could become the official one. I was thrilled with this idea and made a few adjustments to make it look more like their official webpage and called the app just New City Catechism. Tim Keller even tweeted a link to my app. After that I kinda lost contact with TGC, but that wasn’t before I saw a beta version of a redeveloped site (not the one now) and I also passed on the Spanish translation of catechism that I had gotten my hands on.

Fast forward to last week, where it looks like the NCC has been re-launched with a new website, Apple & Android apps and even a paper version – all brought out by Crossway. In no way do I want to compete with or be seen to be against Crossway or the other people behind the New City Catechism. Since they now have a presence in the Google Play store, I think it is time that I must decrease so they can do their thing.

I emailed Crossway my plans and also my concerns about losing functionality. I offered my code and Spanish text, but they didn’t seem to need it. This is completely fine – if I’m honest my code would probably have been useless to them.

The functions that I think have been lost in the new app are:

• it doesn’t progress through the questions each week, ie every time you open your app you have to advance to the question you want to go to; and you can’t set a start date from when you want to do the catechism
• there is no widget to display the weekly question on your home screen
• no links to the videos
• no Spanish translation

They said they would be working on some of these features in the future.

My course of action is to put up a new screen on start up, wait a week or two so the update has a chance to push out to as many devices as possible and then pull the app from the Play Store. I was going to nuke the whole app, but I think people may miss the functionality, so if you have the app now, just don’t uninstall it. I will also leave the latest APK on this site.

This has been one of the more successful apps of mine. I don’t put this down to my great code, but to the great content of the catechism. I will post again in a few weeks with a re-cap of this app, once I have taken it off the Play Store.

Hopefully I now have got the hang of Android widgets. I noticed that after the new update the questions weren’t moving:

I first thought the date calculation was off by one week, but as I dug into it it seemed that it wouldn’t go back to the correct position if you opened up the answer for that question. I have also tweaked the widget code a bit making it a few lines shorter here and there. Hopefully it means it is more robust

The widget should now work as planned. If you do go forward or back and open up that answer, you should be able to leave it there and the next time the widget updates it will take you back to the week/question you should be on.

Fingers crossed.

I must admit that I am a bit slack with checking in with the New City Catechism every week. But for this year I am going to try and check out each question per week (as it is intended). However, for awhile I have noticed that the widget would always default back to question one, and since the beginning of this year the actual app seemed to be having trouble working out what question it should be displaying.

I’m on the cusp of releasing a new app and I generally only like working on one app at a time, but the date not changing correctly finally annoyed me so much that I sat down last night to fix it. This is the second patch I have tried for the widget, so fingers cross this one will work.

I have just push the new update to the Play Store and if you can’t wait for that to update you can download the APK from the portfolio page.

It seems that there is a bug in the New City Catechism widget. The cause is related to the widget not finding the start date preference in the app, so it doesn’t know what question to start from. When it looks, it seems the app is not in memory and the preference can not be found. I have experienced the error, but when I did, I wasn’t near my PC for me to run diagnostics on it.

Based on the 27 error reports I have received, I think I have solved the issue, but I am not 100% sure. It is now set to say that, if the date preference can not be found, then set the week to start on to be 1.

This has just been pushed to the play store (and on this site), so it should update soon on your device. Hopefully this will stop the error from appearing. I will be looking at the error reports to see if more come in on the new version.

Sorry to everyone who has experienced this crash, and thanks to all who sent back the crash report. It is useful when lots of people sent the same error.

I wanted to make an android widget for one of my apps for a while now, just to see if I could. Way back in August last year, on twitter I said I would start working on one after October. It seems October 2014 turned into May 2015, this was because I wanted to release mobile multiply in Spanish first.

Anyway, I have just pushed the new update to the play store which contains the widget. This lists all the questions in a stack view, and when you touch them it will display the answer in a slightly bigger card, due to the answers being longer than the questions, they need more space to display. This works in English and in Spanish. There is even a setting to choose if you want to show the adult or children’s answers.

I only have my one phone screen size to play with, so sizing objects can be a bit tricky.  Hopefully it will work. Also I had to up the minimum android version to display a stack widget. This mean the update is only for Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) and above. Before Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) was supported. According to Android stats. Gingerbread has about 6.25% market share, and only 1.18% of my users are running it. I think this is an ok loss of support.

And while I was looking at stats, New City Catechism has just crossed over the 11,000th download. It was only at the end of March when it got to it’s 10,000th.

A minor update has just been pushed to the play store for the New City Catechism app. This now includes the catechism introduction in Spanish (thanks Eduardo Barrientos) and I also took out the little zoom in and out controls (if you are running higher than honeycomb). Pinch to zoom still works, but now those little buttons shouldn’t annoy you.

You can wait for the play store to update, or you can download the APK from the profile page now (and if you run a kindle and want to side load it).