Church Publishing released their first foray into publishing for handhelds this week: eCP (Electronic Common Prayer).
"eCP: electronic Common Prayer is a downloadable application for PalmOS handheld devices that puts services of the Book of Common Prayer and Daily Office readings at your fingertips. The calendar screen shows today's date; the current liturgical season and color; the commemoration of the day; hyperlinked collects, prefaces, and full texts of Daily Office lessons, psalms, and gospel readings. The hyperlinked BCP services give you flexibility for hospital calls, outdoor celebrations, camp and daily personal devotions."
I downloaded the program and paid the $29.95 since the program does not have a demo mode and won't even open without a registration code. I frankly have to say I am pretty disappointed. I already had a BCP in iSilo format on my Palm and the downloadable daily office from the Mission of St. Claire. I also use a Palm OS Bible from Olivetree software. The first thing that is noticeable about eCP is that it is SLOOOOOW. I have a Tungsten T5, which is actually a pretty speedy little device (It can play video, after all.) The program (which takes up 10 MB of memory) took over a minute to load. It looks like the program is written in Java, which may account for why it takes so long to run. Inside the program is a BCP, a calendar, a daily office and a bookmarking function.
What I was hoping for was a daily office function that would ask you some basic questions (Which invitatory? which Lord's prayer? etc.) and then generate a file with the entire text of the office so that you could read it straight through - kind of like what the Mission of St. Claire site does, but on a random-access basis. Unfortunately, the office in the eCP is simply a text of the BCP with all the rubrics and options left in and hyperlinks to the psalter and office readings. If it's not Eastertide, there's really no point in having to scroll past the Easter opening sentences or the Pascha Nostrum every day - a computer program should be smarter than that. The links to the psalter and readings are to those modules (not to the readings for the day) so you still have to set bookmarks and all of this works at a snail's pace (might work faster on a Treo - hard to say, but it's still a lot slower than the iSilo BCP). If I was reading the daily office with people who were using a traditional BCP, I would fall behind.
I like books. I am comfortable with nice ribbon bookmarks. If I am going to adopt a technology, it needs to have advantages over the existing technology of my Daily Office book and Galley's The Prayer Book Office. In the case of a Palm program, it needs to be more flexible and useful than the free resources I already have and use. With eCP, I can't say that either of these criteria are met. I hope that future versions might leverage more of the advantages that can be gained with an electronic resource, rather than simply being an enhanced e-text.
David+
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