Tech Talk: The Highly Customizable Rosary App

Find the Tech Talk archive here.

Without my iPad, my prayer life is vastly different. For one thing, I lose my prayer book.

I added the Rosary HD app from ESB Solutions to my essential apps folder just last week. At $2.99, it's a bargain. Take it from someone who continues to search for the perfect rosary app.

(No such thing, sorry to say, but this one's definitely a keeper!)

Let me walk you through Rosary HD and tell you what I love about it.

It is full of options.

You can adjust the language you use, decide how the layout looks, choose what your rosary looks like (beads, crucifix, medal), and adjust the background. You can decide if you want background music or not and whether it's helpful to have noise after each prayer, each decade, or not at all.

It integrates personalized prayer.

Let me show you what I mean.

When you click on Prayers, you see a screen like this:

You'll select a mystery (I used the Fourth Glorious Mystery).

If you turn the Text button to ON, like so:

Then you will see a screen where you can type:

You'll see the personalized intentions, prayers, or notes you typed when you pray that mystery (and only on that mystery).

This goes beyond anything I have seen in any other rosary app and really makes me reconsider my intentions while I'm praying my rosary. It also makes me think about whole new ways to pray the rosary, like dedicating certain mysteries to certain intentions in my life.

You pick how you pray.

Though I mentioned above that there are many options to this app, I want to spend a bit more time, beyond language.

I pray the rosary a lot. It's easy to lose steam, to get distracted, to become bored.

It's hard for an app to meet the need of someone who wants to pray without crossing a line. I think the makers of this app provided some great options so that, on the days when I really need the words to the prayers in front of me, I can have them: