Hello, everyone. I'm very excited to post here again with a follow up to the post I made some time ago where I mentioned that my friend and I were working together on developing Orthodox Calendar mobile app. Well, we released it on Android and I wanted to share some updates here in case some of you find it useful. Imho it’s especially relevant now as the Great Fast is around the corner. And we had a very fruitful discussion last time, so I'm very excited to hear your opinions!
With our Orthodox calendar you can track information about feasts, saints, fast periods, and get some basic recommendations about food restrictions during fasting. You can check out the app by downloading it from Google Play. Feedback is appreciated!
Getting it out of the way cause I wanna share some info about the calendar below.
Design
It’s been 5 months since the last post and we’ve changed a lot of things. The design was the biggest visible improvement. A friend of ours has been helping us to create and improve on the current design. Special thanks to them for such amazing work.iOS development
We’ve created mock-ups for iOS design according to their conventions and started the work on development. There are some obstacles with it but it’s the first priority after Android release, so we’re sorting it out soon.Calendar data
Let’s talk about the meat and bones of the application. We have 2 versions of the calendar: Julian (Christmas on 7th) and Revised Julian (Christmas on 25th). We took a calendar from OCA as a core and made some enrichment to the data (mostly related to some technical stuff). We also translated that data into other languages (more info in the section below) which was a formidable undertaking by itself (we didn’t have all the right infrastructure and the process was slow).We’ve got information about feasts, saints, fasts, fast exceptions (foods allowed), feast symbols, and liturgical colors. Liturgical colors are only available for Julian for now, and they might have some differences from church to church, though it’s mostly extra information, so we’ll add some explanations about it and refine it over time.
With fast exceptions things are more interesting. The fasting rules by themselves are described in Typikon, though they are very strict and were modified over time to fit local parishes (monastic rules are a whole different topic). As a result, the rules differ greatly from church to church. We tried to give some general and more casual guidelines. However, we’re planning to add some configuration of those in the future as well as outline all the fasting rules in the app. This development is only in concept stages. Since the rules are more ambiguous but important, we added an ability to disable these guidelines completely in the settings. That’s for the people who already know the rules by heart or prefer a paper calendar for that type of information.
And I’ll mention here again that your feedback is very important to us. We can’t correct or improve on anything that we’re not aware of, so if you’ve got some recommendations, feel free to reach out (directly in the app, here in the comments, by directly contacting us, etc).
Languages
Currently, we have the following languages in the app:- English
- Russian
- Ukrainian
Next steps
The most important thing is where we go from here, right? Our plans are grand and we have a long road ahead to reach them. If our God is willing, we’ll get there eventually.Some of our next steps are:
- iOS release
- Addition of dark mode
- Additional feasts tracking
- Daily readings
As of now, the only thing for us to do is to keep moving forward. And we’ll figure out everything else as we go.
TL;DR
The calendar took a lot of time and effort to develop. We did a full redesign of the UI. We’re working on releasing the iOS version next and we’ve got quite a few improvements planned for the future.You can check out the app by downloading it from Google Play (or share with someone that you know might be interested).
Thanks for reading. Looking forward to your comments!
