Price reduction

We have reduced the price of a licence for the downloadable Universalis program from £30 to £19.99. On 3 July 2009 this was approximately $33 or €23. (To get an up-to-date equivalent, click on the links).

Prices for the Universalis application for the iPhone and iPod Touch, sold through the iPhone App Store, are cheaper: £14.99 / $24.99 / €14.99.

Of course the web version continues to be free. So does the Catholic Calendar application in the iPhone App Store. For other systems, if you just want a free Catholic Calendar and nothing else, download the Universalis program and don’t bother to buy a registration code for it.

The AvantGo web service is closing

An announcement on AvantGo’s web site says that they are closing their mobile web service at the end of June 2009.

Here is our page about the available options.

Daytime hours coming soon

The “Little Hours” will appear in Universalis soon: Terce for mid-morning, Sext at midday, and None in the middle of the afternoon.

“Though some hesitated”

Yesterday’s Gospel was from Matthew 28:16-20, and it has this sentence:

When they saw him they fell down before him, though some hesitated.

I’m sure one could draw out some terribly pious moral from this, but I’m not interested in that. For me, that sentence is fun because it shines a little light into the very human process of writing a gospel. Anyone who has ever written a family memoir will know the problem well.

We can’t say everyone behaved perfectly on that occasion, because it would be untrue: X. didn’t. We can’t say everyone behaved perfectly except X, because it would be unkind: poor X. just had a wobbly moment.

And so a passion for truth and a passion for charity collide, and the result is the true but tactful phrase: “though some hesitated”.

For me, little things like this are the strongest argument for the authenticity of the Gospels.

Narrower banners for webmasters

Someone asked us if we could make the Universalis banner narrower so that she could fit it at the side of her blog. Something like this:

So now, as you see, we have. You can choose your own banner width, within reason (because the banners don’t get any deeper as they get narrower). Instructions are here.

Copy and Paste

In the last mailing to the Universalis mailing list I forgot to mention that the new version of the Windows download now has easier ways of copying to the Clipboard. In addition, the Windows Mobile download , which couldn’t copy at all, now has that ability. In both cases you can copy the current reading or the whole page.

Follow the links to get the downloads and see the instructions.

The Apple Curtain

Since the launch of the iPhone, the world of Universalis downloads has been divided in two by an “Apple curtain”. For everything except the iPhone and the iPod Touch, you could buy one registration code that would work on any computer you had: Mac, Windows, Palm, and many handhelds. But the iPhone version was sold directly by Apple through the iPhone App Store. It wasn’t sold by us and we weren’t allowed to extend our registration code system to cover the iPhone.

This was unfair because  it meant that if you had a PC and an iPhone, you ended up having to pay twice. Now we’ve worked out a way of cutting a hole in the Apple Curtain.

From now on, if you own the iPhone version, you will not need to buy a registration code for other systems – PC / Mac / Palm etc.

e-books: what is the missing ingredient?

There is a debate in the e-book world – well, not so much a debate as an extended rumination – about how to make e-books worth more to the people who buy them. We know the conveniences by now – easy portability – and the inconvenience – slowness for flicking through, and expense when you leave them on the train. New e-book readers are coming on the market every week or so, and people do buy them. But still the question remains: how do we make people want e-books, and how do we make them want them more than they want books? As Joe Wikert says, “Figure out how to add more value to the ebook“. But how?

This post will give a possible answer to that question, and also give an explanation to the people who email me every day to ask whether there’s going to be a version of Universalis for the Amazon Kindle (and if not, why not).

The Church of the Future

Many people will more or less rely on the Church, who will somehow, and from the outside, as it were, share her inner life. The parish will remain the essential cell of community life, but it will scarcely be possible to keep up the entire parish system as it now exists (a system that is of rather recent date). We will have to learn how to come together, and that will be an enrichment. In the astonishing diversity of Christian forms of life today, the Church tomorrow is already very clearly among us.

God’s mirth

So we sit perhaps in a starry chamber of silence, while the laughter of the heavens is too loud for us to hear… The tremendous figure which fills the Gospels… never concealed His tears. Yet He concealed something… He never restrained His anger… Yet He restrained something… There was something that He hid from all men when He went up a mountain to pray. There was something that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or imperious isolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that is was His mirth.