New Siddur App Lets You Daven On Apple Watch

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apple-watchThe new RustyBrick Apple Watch Siddur, says RustyBrick CEO Barry Schwartz, is “aimed at making Jewish life just a bit easier.” The goal is to give individuals easy access to common tefillos, important zmanim, a glance at the Jewish calendar and access to find nearby shuls, reports Times of Israel.

The app was made available in the App Store Monday for Watch owners who are using iOS 7.1.

The app, Schwartz believes, is also the answer to prayers for better-written Watch apps. Although the Watch has been on the market for barely a month, there’s already a lot of griping in the tech media about its apps, with the main complaint being that they are just very slow. For example, uber-geek and app author Marco Arment wrote in a recent post on his blog about how a watch app he designed based on an iPhone app “sucked. WatchKit load times are inconsistent and problematic. Every time the interface loads or changes, the Watch and iPhone communicate round-trip over Bluetooth. Whether due to wireless flakiness, 1.0 OS bugs, or (most likely) both, WatchKit is frustratingly unreliable.”

That’s not a problem for RustyBrick’s Apple Watch Siddur app, said Schwartz, which was designed from the ground up for Apple Watches. “This update is not some basic Apple Watch app you’ve seen from others, it is likely the most comprehensive Apple Watch app out there.”

The app provides full details on times for tefillos, shul location, brachos, Daf Yomi, Sefiras Ha’omer, and much more.

Among the features: “Quick prayers” which show up in the correct context (hour of day, etc.) on a Watch; a Jewish calendar with programmable alerts for times of tefillos, Yomim Tovim, events, etc.; a shul locator that shows you where services are taking place, connected to the iPhone’s map app which provides directions; and “handoff support with the iPhone, which allows a screen that is being displayed on the Watch to show up on the iPhone.

That latter feature is important, because although Watch apps can operate independently, they are generally much more useful when working in tandem with an iPhone “parent app.” On the other hand, many such Watch apps simply display the same screens that can be seen on the iPhone and are effectively just mirrors of their namesake app. The RustyBrick app is neither “rootless” nor iPhone dependent; it’s got its own screens and displays, and connects to databases to display times, locations, etc. on its own, but knows when to defer to its Big Brother, always remaining on call in case the user wants the larger feature set of the iPhone Siddur app during their interaction with the Watch version.

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{Matzav.com}


7 COMMENTS

  1. This is a terrible terrible bisayon of Teffila. Kllal Yisroel has used a Siddur for millennium. The Chofetz Chaim would of not liked this trend.

  2. To “Anonymous”: That’s probably what they said when they started printing siddurim instead of writing them on scrolls… it’s all a matter of perception. I don’t think there’s anything wrong- in fact, the mere fact that tefillos are written at all is not how it always was. It’s ‘tefillas Halev’, and a siddur is just meant to help our dor concentrate and say it correctly. Some people just criticize anything new- get over it.

  3. I agree with 1. This is not being”mekadeysh” anything. It promotes unfiltered Internet with all the arayus and kefira. Also it undermines the one and only one heter to use the internet, which is parnasa. Third, it could lead to chilul shabbos, rachmana letzlan.

  4. I am all for the iWatch davening. The Anges can see the weared has a gold thumb. But of course, if he was using a siddur, his thumb would be named platinum. Just because tech is cool does not mean that common sense can not be bigger. Give time half a chance. Torah was not unlimited pixels for comedy.

  5. And I agree with 2. Perhaps it’s just a matter of perspective. I see little to protest about the iWatch that’s not already in the iPhone, iPad, or their Android counterparts, and plenty of shtarke yiddoen already have them. Since they’re here to stay, yasher koach to Rusty Brick for trying to harness them to our advantage.

  6. where the kedusha of klal yisroel going? how much lower will we go g-d forbid

    whats next? make a minyan over 10 people with iwatch & see each other & daven while driving G-D FORBID

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