The latest version of the St Bede’s Breviary is now up. This new release includes a number of features that people have been requesting:
- cookie support—if you go to the “Preferences” page, you can now save your Office-praying options and they will stay set whenever you return to the site.
- additional sanctoral kalendars—In addition to the kalendars as printed in the ’79 BCP and the extended Holy Women Holy Men, it also includes the Church of England’s Exciting Holiness, the current Roman Catholic kalendar, the ordines of the Order of the Holy Cross and the Order of Julian of Norwich, and the kalendars from the Anglican and English Missals.
- improved aesthetics—including a layout which functions for handheld devices; I’ve been praying the Offices via Blackberry with it
- additional information on the sources of the material
- some brief catechetical material included in the preferences page.
Quite a lot has also changed under the hood in the way that it calculates dates, but—hopefully—no one but me will know that…
It’s still in beta, so I’m not promising that it’s bug-free, but this does represent a big step forward towards the goal I’m trying to fully realize here.
As always, it’s your breviary as much as it is mine, please feel free to send in thoughts, questions, comments, and new feature requests. As to the latter, I’ll let you know that the NRSV readings are in the works as is a build-out to include the Prayers and Thanksgivings on BCP pp. 810-841.
Well done, sir!
Morning Prayer today with my Android – thanks! This is going to be enormously helpful.
I’ve been using the site on my iPod touch and iPad almost exclusively the past few weeks I’ve been back at work. It’s worked beautifully, and I’m happy to see the cookies support! Keep up the great work!
Great job. Now I wonder when someone is going to make a Daily Office iPhone or iPad app.
Thanks all–yes, I’ll revisit the whole iPad app thing, but can’t promise anything at this point…
Thanks so much for your efforts. Works just fine on my Droid, both the built-in and Opera browsers. I know it must have pained you to include the Holy Women/Holy Men, so I applaud you for your ecumenism.
I didn’t say you had to do it. I’m just surprised some other enterprising Episcopalian out there hasn’t done it yet. There is an iBCP app, but it’s basically just a transcription of the ’79 BCP. There is also a Lectionary app (http://www.iphonelectionary.com/) that includes the Daily Office readings, but that would still mean flipping back and forth, that is, if you can get the new multitasking to work right.
Derek:
I’ve got all BCP Daily Office Readings in NRSV in Microsoft WORD, do you want them?
You’ve already sent them; I just have to get them all stuffed into a database!
Thank you so much for your work. As someone who recently came over from the Roman Catholic Church, I especially appreciate the ability to set preferences for Anglo-Catholic prayers.