iSalat

iSalat for iPhone is a newer prayer times calculation app for the iPhone/iPod Touch not available when I last reviewed iPhone/iPod Touch apps. It is not as flashy as iPray, and doesn't yet do an Athan (which is not particularly helpful on the iPhone/iPod Touch due to its lack of 3rd party apps having access to an alert system). It does, however, support 3 ways to determine the Qibla and relies on GPS/Network Faux-GPS to determine your location and thus relieves you from having to constantly reprogram the thing when traveling. It's also a bit cheaper than iPray, and I think a pretty good buy.

iPhone/iPod Touch v2.0 Applications

The Intraweb is all a buzz with the new iPhone 3G and the new 2.0 version of their OS that rolled out with it. The 2.0 OS runs on the original iPhone, the new iPhone, and the iPod Touch (for a small price). This new OS now has an "App Store" for purchasing or downloading applications for your device, and has opened up a world of possibility for these seemingly powerful little gadgets. Previous to this you would have to "jailbreak" your device which runs all sorts of risks that I won't take on a device that is still under warrantee, so I upgraded my iPod immediately.

The next question, of course, is how can the new OS help improve my deen? At first, not a lot, but after a while it is apparent that some developers have answered the call to provide solutions for Muslims, and in our case Muslims on the Go.

iQibla $4.99
Category: Utilities
Released: Jul 23, 2008
Seller: Daniel Hammond
© 2008 Two Toasters LLC
Version: 1.0
0.2 MB

With the latest iPhone 3G and it's built in GPS Muslims now have the ability to find direction of the Qibla accurately using their iPhones.

I haven't purchased this one, so I can't tell you how this runs. $4.99 seems cheap enough for something so important, but since you can also pull up the Qibla Locator website in Safari, you're just paying $4.99 for the device to think it knows where you are. If you have a 3G iPhone and you're outside, GPS should do it, otherwise you have to hope that the fallback methods of cell tower location guess and/or IP Geolocation guess are good enough. I think sticking with the Qibla direction methods I posted about before should be fine.

Izkar $0.99
Category: Utilities
Released: Jul 11, 2008
Seller: Haploid
© HAPLOID
Version: 1.0
0.2 MB

Although it's only 99 cents, I haven't purchased this one either. It's basically a simulation of tasbih aka dhikr beads. I guess it would be helpful, since you are likely to have your iPhone or iPod with you all of the time, but the sort of Muslim who uses tasbih tends to carry them around anyway. It also has prayer time calculation, but I'm still holding out before spending my hard earned 99 cents.

Quran $9.99
Category: Reference Released: Jul 26, 2008
Seller: Safeer Jiwan
© 2008 Safeer Jiwan
Version: 1.0
0.4 MB

This seems like a good deal, however it seems much more limited than the iQuran Pro (below) which I ended up purchasing. It appears that Brother Safeer does have some things planned for his application, and future updates he promises for free, but currently it is just the English translation by M.H. Shakir. If you are tight for money or space on your device, this may be one way to go.

iQuran Free Category: Reference Released: Aug 06, 2008 Seller: Guided Ways Tech.Ltd © Guided Ways Tech., Ltd. Version: 2.1 1.2 MB

iQuran Pro $24.95 Category: Reference Released: Aug 03, 2008 Seller: Guided Ways Tech. Ltd © Guided Ways Techn., Ltd. Version: 2.1 1.2 MB

From the App Store:

iQuran offers its users the Complete Quran in Arabic along with its various translations. Richly featured and fully interactive! Specially designed to allow easy reading with scrolling, iPhone style. With excellent built-in audio capabilities, iQuran utilizes these to provide a very satisfying recitation play back experience, excellent navigation and fast scrolling support with verse for verse recitation along with auto-scrolling and verse highlighting.

This one is packed with a ton of goodies. I originally downloaded the free version, and very much liked the way the app worked, however I waited for the pro version (yes it was after the free, even though the dates don't seem to agree) because I rather dislike the only English translation that comes with the free version: M Mohsin Khan. The pro version gives you a choice of Khan, Yusuf Ali, Pickthal, or Shakir as well as transliterated (so you can sound it out) and some international versions: French, German, Indonesian, Melayu, Spanish, and Turkish. Also you have a choice of recitations: Husary, Al-Afasy, Sudais & Shuraim, Ash-Shaatree, Abdul Basit, or Ghamdi.

Two more features that really put this over the top, and hopefully will get much use during Ramadhan, is markers in the text and index for each Surah, each Hizb, and each Juz and then on top of that auto-bookmarking to remember where you left off. This way you should easily be able to stay on top of your reading and finish the Qur'an during Ramadhan.

The only drawback that this app seems to have is also part of its strength. Instead of pre-installing with all of the above options, you select your translation if desired and your reciter and it only downloads when it needs it. You can ask it to download all surah for the selected translation/reciter, but it still will only download that option. This allows the program to not consume your entire device, and since the current options are limited in size, this is a good thing. However after you download this much, on your next sync it will back up everything, and that backup may take quite a while. I'm not sure why it takes so much longer to back up over USB than it did to download all of the surah over WiFi, but it does so be prepared.

Athan

Nope, none yet. Odd too because to me the one thing I certainly need to know is when to pray no matter where I am. I see that Guided Ways has an application called iPray that they sell for jailbroken devices so I can only assume they are working on getting it approved and into the App Store for purchase. It should do prayer times and athan and from the feedback on their website is a well liked program.

Online Quran

So you find yourself on the road, and you've got your laptop with you, or perhaps in the hotel Internet Cafe and somehow have a ton of time on your hands. If only you had remembered your Qur'an. No worries, there are now very good online Qur'an, with multiple language translations, and recitation, and in multiple fonts, all in the same interface. Here's a couple that I like a lot:

Tanzil.info

QuranExplorer.com

Windows Mobile 6 Standard

I've just "upgraded" my phone from a T-Mobile MDA to the T-Mobile Dash. It's much smaller and the phone functions work much better and I'd been eyeing it for a while. The Dash runs Windows Mobile 6 Standard which is the son of Windows Mobile 5 Smartphone. WM Smartphone OS has some oddities about it so that many people don't even bother porting their apps to it, or they just haven't realized that there is a new version since Smartphone 2003.

I am easily distracted so I really need my ever present personal companion (my phone) to tell me when to pray. The MDA did this nicely with Pocket Islam, as I mentioned earlier, so the first thing I did was try to install Pocket Islam on my new Dash. No luck. Their software will install, but it hasn't been updated since the version for 2003 so the screen doesn't map correctly. In addition it actually messes up parts of the OS like the fonts, and can never be fully uninstalled. So I wiped my phone back to factory settings and tried a few others.

mAthan is bare bones. Super bare bones. It would install, but it just assumed my screen was the size of an MDA screen and you can't read 1/2 of the screen. It also doesn't have any way to stop the Athan, so if you are in the wrong place you have to leave or smother your phone to not bother folks once it goes off. It also makes a few assumptions about how you want your times calculated.

I tried Delta Minaret, but it is a java program and doesn't do Athan, just calculations. I guess it could be handy to have the calculations portable, but Delta Minaret also didn't calculate my screen correctly, and didn't have many cities to choose from.

Everything else I found for a Windows Mobile platform didn't do WM6 Standard, so I can't tell you what they are like. This means I have to resort to the method I previously used on my Sidekick. The advantage to the method is that as long as you can sync your calendar with your phone/PDA/watch or anything else you carry with you, you can get alerts when it's time to pray. The disadvantage is that it requires MS Outlook and doesn't call Athan. So I installed the Microsoft provided ITWorx PrayerTimes calculation plug in for Outlook 2007. (Update: links no longer work, plug-in can now be found at Speedy Share)

It's working fine, though now on my Laptop I have 3 programs that calculate prayer times. The Outlook plug-in, the ITWorx Vista Sidebar Gadget (with crappy echoey Athan), and Islamic Finder's prayer times calculator.

I did find another Java prayer times calculator, Islamic Finder Mobile, that I like a lot, it still doesn't do Athan, or have alerts, but it covers thousands of cities around the world, so it's good for travel.

Where Can I Pray?

When traveling you are frequently confronted with unfamiliar surroundings. If you are lucky enough to be traveling in an area with a large Muslim population, you will probably not have much difficulty finding a masjid or musalla to pray, or at least someone will be able to offer a spare room. What about traveling in largely non-Muslim lands?

One great resource that I use is Islamic Finder. Once upon a time I had a meager prayer times calculation site that went through a series of rewrites and hosting changes which I eventually abandoned because the guys at Islamic Finder were doing such a great job. Not only does their site assist with Qibla determination and prayer timings, but it can help find Muslim owned business and mosques all over the world. This is especially handy when moving to a new area, or even just a long visit.

What about while you are traveling, or if Islamic Finder comes up short? I have been known to pray in a spare spot in a parking lot, or stop off at a rest stop on the highway. When I travel I keep my compass with me and usually have looked up prayer times in advance. I take advantage of the ease allowed to us by combining prayers when traveling, and remember that all of the Earth is a musalla (with a few exceptions).

The tricky part, I have found, is when I'm traveling by plane or train. You can't ask them to pull over, and you have long waits in the terminal while waiting to leave. In the US for sure, and I'm sure many other countries, airports frequently have a "chapel", "prayer room", "meditation room" or "quiet place". Hunt these down. Not only can you pray in peace and safety, but they frequently have a small shelf with donated Qur'ans and prayer rugs. Many times someone has indicated in some way where the Qibla is as well. I have had a hard time locating these rooms, they don't always show up on all maps (like in Incheon airport in Seoul Korea), but eventually I usually find one. Checking websites for airports in advance to plan out where you'll be able to pray doesn't hurt either.

Where is the Qibla?

This is a tricky one. How do you determine what way to pray when you are away from home (or move into a new home) and aren't in a Masjid or Musullah? There are a few different methods, and each has its strengths and weaknesses:

GPS Method

This is the easiest of the three methods, but also the most expensive. Any GPS receiver won't do, it must be a GPS receiver that can point from where you are toward another geographic spot in the world. Many camping/backpacking, orienteering, geocaching, fishing, hunting, etc. GPS models will have this ability. You enter the latitude and longitude of Mecca and it points the way. Easy peasy, but not so cheap.

Compass Method

This method is relatively cheap since a compass can cost just $10 or $15 but unlike the GPS method requires some know how and some calculations. First you will need to know what direction Mecca is (from my house this would be 56.5° from north) this already shows our first difficulty: using an accurate compass. Mine is marked by every other degree meaning that it can tell me 54°, 56°, 58° but certainly not to the 1/2°. This can make a big difference over a vast distance (like that to Mecca) but any method used can't be assured to be 100% correct without getting a professional surveyor to do it for you. The next issue with this method is that the calculations provide you the direction toward Mecca using the north pole. And your compass uses the "magnetic north pole" to tell you the direction. And, here's the tricky part, they aren't the same place. Why aren't they the same place? The short answer is that the magnetic north pole is around Greenland. The long answer is here. How can you adjust for this difference? Via more calculations. The National Geophysics Data Center is kind enough to calculate this for me, and determine the difference between my calculation and reality is -10.67°or -10.5° if I round it. Great so now what do I do with that number? The long answer is here and covers each situation of what kind of compass you have and what you are trying to do with it. In the case of finding the Qibla the answer is I need to subtract the number I recived from the calculation or: 56.5° - -10.5° = 67° from north (since subtracting a negative is the same as adding...).

Sun Method

This method has the advantage of being essenntially free, and very accurate, but has the disadvantage of only working a couple times a day, and requires visibility of the sun. It's a great method to use when you move to a new house to ensure that your prayers are dead on, but when traveling it isn't so handy. IslamicFinder.org will provide the details, for example from my house. They calculate when a sundial (or your) shadow will point directly toward Mecca (or directly away or at a 90° angle). At that time you view the shadow of a sundial (or flagpole, etc. etc.) and note the direction and then try to duplicate that inside your house.

Whichever method you pick, it may require some planning in advance. Either purchasing and carying the GPS receiver, having the compass calculations at hand, or the URLs required to get the numbers you need at hand, or programs installed on your portable technology that will arrive at the numbers required, or the sun calculations at hand. Of course now that I've posted this with links, I guess you can just remember muslimtogo.blogspot.com and visit a nearby Internet Cafe wherever you go...

Update: Great tip from reader Ibrahim Shafi is the website Qibla Locator. A great mash-up using google maps so you can zoom right into the building you are in and use landmarks or your knowledge of the facility to site your qibla very accurately. Kudos to ibn Mas'ud, great job.

Electronic Reader

An electronic reader is an outstanding way to take your Islam with you, in concept at least. As I mentioned last time Pocket Islam does have a Qur'an Reader included, but I found it always booted into Arabic and always reset to Al Fatiha. I can't remember where I left off.

On my Palm OS device so many years ago I found iSilo. A good enough reader, even good enough that I purchased a copy. They appear to have versions for Palm, Windows CE, Windows Mobile, and Symbian. The documents are easy enough to find, and when you can't you can use their program to convert HTML into an iSilo document. Using an HTML spider program you can even rip a copy of a Qur'an or Hadith collection and then convert that into iSilo.

Recently, however, I think I found better. Mobipocket supports Palm, Windows CE, Windows Mobile, Windows, Symbian, and Blackberry. It also natively runs on the Iliad and Cybook readers and non-DRM Mobipocket docs can be read on the new Amazon.com Kindle. Mobipocket (which seems to be owned by Amazon.com) even has a creator program that converts a few different formats: PDF, Word, Text, HTML. You can then package covert art, create a table of contents, etc. I used this to convert a PDF of the meaning of the Qur'an in English as translated by Muhsin Khan.

The Qur'an looks good enough on my PDA phone, but it's still a small screen, and the backlight keeps turning off. I've ordered an eReader that uses eInk (the above mentioned Kindle) and I hope that it is large enough and easy enough to read that I can bring it to salat jumah and get some reading in before the khutbah begins. The Islamia website appears to have multiple documents available for download that should be easily converted for use in either iSilo or Mobipocket, though I can't vouch for their authenticity.