1. ANTIPHONS, ANTIPHONS, ANTIPHONS! I am very happy to see them added.

2. Terce, Sext, and None are there in their entirety! I was also happy to see them too.

However . . . I have to admit in an original frustration with Universalis’s PDA version (late last year), I missed the “little hours” and the antiphons so much, that I took a leap and waded right into the Latin version of the LOTH (I had learned college Latin in the seminary about 30 years ago – before I left in the middle of priestly education). And what happend? I got hooked on the Latin and that’s where I mainly pray the Office now.

BUT I’m no Latin scholar either – the Office of Readings, esp. the Second Reading (Lectio Altera) often gives me a lot of trouble in understanding what I’m reading. So, whether I am praying the Office at the ‘Breviary’ site or on my PDA – Universalis is there to help me with it.

I would like to kindly make a suggestion for some future update of Universalis though: the inclusion of the shorter prayers for Vespers. I used to use those all the time when I prayed from the Grail edition of the US English version. I was delighted to discover that the Latin edition on the Net has them too. In fact I made a PDA version for my Plucker edition of the Latin hours. I think some Universalis users might like the shorter prayers too.

The shorter prayers for Vespers are really in a simple Latin – so simple that I wouldn’t mind translating them all and sending a text version to the author for review and editing if he wishes. He’s got my email or can respond here if he’s interested.

I would like this method the best, just to give you a vote for what I’d like. You could have Daytime listed as a separate heading below the others, then:

Day Psalms: Terce, Sext, None
Hour Psalms: Terce, Sext, None

That should be user-friendly, I would hope.

For those who don’t know: the LOTH gives the psalms for only one daytime hour each day, and lets you decide which hour you use them for. If you’re saying more than one of the daytime hours then you use the Complementary Psalmody for the other hours. Both for reasons of user interface and because it means less translation, I’ve started by using the Complementary Psalmody throughout.

I’m taking a rest from all this for a bit, but next time I tackle the subject, I’ll look carefully at how to provide the extra psalms without confusing people. The trouble is that there are too many possibilities! One way is to have Terce, Sext and None listed twice on the web site, once with “psalms of the day” and once with “psalms of the hour”. Another way is to use Rellis’s idea of a separate “Generic Daytime” hour, but that would have to contain three sets of readings and prayers. Another way is to double the size of each of Terce, Sext and None by including both sets of psalms in each.

It’ll be a good idea to wait in any case, to see how people get on with the daytime hours in the form they are in now. That may give us some clues as to how to proceed from there.

Do you have any plans to handle the 28 daytime prayer cycles from the Psalter? If so, I guess you could just integrate them into a generic “Daytime Prayer” with Terce, Sext, and None as you currently have it. People could use Daytime Prayer in lieu of one of the other three, if they wanted to pray all of the canonical hours.

It just keeps getting better! Thanks.

This is much appreciated with joy! God bless!