About the Prayer Times Gadget
A Windows Vista/7 Sidebar
Gadget.
I am Muslim, thank God.If you
don't know, Muslim pray five times a day, every single day.
When I used to work for Microsoft, I used to spend a lot of
time in front of the computer. At that time we were
"dogfooding" (i.e. testing) Windows Vista before it was
released. Vista was sluggish to say the least and I wanted a
piece of software that will remind me of my prayers, but
without consuming a lot of CPU and memory. Vista introduced
the Sidebar. I thought of creating the Prayer Times gadget,
and I did.
The first version was very simple. It was only me who
used it. Then, I shared it with other Muslim colleagues at
Microsoft. They liked it. They started sending me their
enhancement requests. And, the gadget started growing.
One of my colleagues suggested that I should publish the
Prayer
Times Gadget on Live Gallery web site and I
did. The
gadget went viral in no time. Alhamdulillah.
Note: Microsoft shut down the Live Gallery back in October 2011. Thus, this web site is your place to get the latest version of the Prayer Times Gadget.
So, What Does it Do?
The Prayer Times Gadget keeps you to date on your prayer
times. It displays the prayer times, Hijri date and Qibla
direction for the city that you choose. It's highly
customizable. You can search for your location or let the
gadget detect it for you. You can specify your Mazhab (i.e.
school of thought) and calculation method.
The gadget streams and plays the Azan that you select
from a list of 14 beautiful Azans (Fajr Azan is the correct
one). If you wish for a complete offline operation, you can
specify MP3, WMA or WAV files from your local hard drive.
You
can control the volume of the Azan and what prayers to play
it
for.
To help you perform your prayers on time, the time for
the next prayer is emphasized. The gadget also
plays
alarms before and/or after prayers (configurable). You can
also play Morning and/or Evening Azkar after Fajr and Asr.
The gadget is translated into several languages: Arabic,
English, Albanian, Spanish & French. If you'd like
to help translating the gadget into your language,
please let
me know.