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Islamic Prayer Times Windows Sidebar Gadget

"Islamic Prayer Times" has been tested in the Softpedia labs using several industry-leading security solutions and found to be completely clean of adware/spyware components. We are impressed with the quality of your product and encourage you to keep these high standards in the future. To assure our visitors that Islamic Prayer Times is clean, we have granted it with the "100% CLEAN" Softpedia award. To let your users know about this certification, you may display this award on your website, on software boxes or inside your product.

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This highly configurable gadget calculates and displays the five daily prayer times on a daily basis. If javascript is enabled in your browser, see it in action as it determines your Your Islamic Prayer Times.

See the various locations across the world that people are using it from.

Main Display

In docked mode, the gadget displays the five daily prayer times (Fajr, Dhuhr, Asr, Maghrib, and Isha) and sunrise (Shurooq) time for a specified location, and either a countdown timer to the highlighted next prayer time, or a digital clock. When clicked on with the mouse, the gadget "flips" to display information about the current date in the Gregorian and Hijri calenders, and the qibla angle in a clockwise or counter-clockwise direction from degrees North.
In undocked mode, the gadget concurrently displays all of the above related information in a single view.

Settings Dialog

The configuration of the gadget is done via the settings dialog which provides a multitude of options that span four tab areas: Location, Method, Parms, and Adhan/Misc. For more information concerning an option, mouse over it or its label to display a tooltip.

Location

The user can search for a location by typing the city, country, and/or region/state in the search text box and then select one from the list of results in the drop down when a search completes, or can select Custom Location to enter a specific latitude and longitude.
If necessary, the user can specify the start and end dates of daylight savings time. For the US and Canada, this capability should be ignored because it is already taken into account in the calculations.

Method

The option to specify one of seven different types of prayer time calculation methods: Egyptian, Shafi, Hanafi, ISNA, Muslim World League, Umm al-Qurra, and Fixed Isha.
For extreme latitude (high North or South locations) calculations, one of fourteen different options can be selected, as well as a Nearest Latitude value for those options that require it, e.g. Nearest Latitude All Prayers Always
One of four different options for rounding seconds can be selected: None, Normal, Special, and Aggressive.
The option to select either the Shafi or Hanafi school of thought shadow ratio for Asr prayer time calculation.

Parms

Calculation angles and intervals in degrees can be entered for Fajr, Imsaak, and Isha times. These values are set to the defaults of the currently selected prayer times calculation method.
Prayer time adjustments in minute offsets can be entered.

Adhan/Misc

An adhan file on disk can be browsed to, or one of four adhan sounds can be selected: Makka, Al-Aqsa, Bosnia, or Turkey. The user can listen to the audio by pressing the play button next to Adhan Sound drop down.
The Blink Prayer Message option can be selected to display a blinking adhan message when the time for prayer comes and the option to play the adhan for that prayer is not selected, e.g. "Fajr Time!"
The ability to turn on/off the adhan sound for each of the prayer times.
Adhan volume adjustment.
One of thirteen different themes for gadget display can be selected.
The option to display a timer to the next prayer time or a digital clock.

Please make dua for me if you find this software beneficial.

"No reward do I ask of you other than that he who so wills may unto his Sustainer find a way!" (Q 25:57)
"And no reward whatever do I ask of you for it: my reward rests with none but the Sustainer of all the worlds." (Q 26:164)

Please report any bugs by specifying the gadget version and any information necessary to reproduce them.

Release Notes (Some old versions are still available to download just in case bugs are introduced with a new release)

To download, click on the link for the specific version.

Version 2.8.4.0
- Fixed a bug where the GMT offset was not being recalculated when transitioning into/out of daylight savings time.
Version 2.8.3.0
- Fixed a bug where the prayer times of locations 12+ hours ahead of the local time of the user, were being calculated for the following day of the current location time.
- Fixed a bug where the blink prayer time message was displaying the next prayer instead of the current one if the docked/undocked mode was switched while currently blinking.
- Fixed a bug that allowed the user to save invalid settings by pressing "OK" on the settings dialog when the service is not available.
- Made some layout changes to the settings dialog.
- Added the capabilities to select a 24 Hour clock, turn on/off the seconds display, and specify a standard (m/d/yyyy) or non-standard (d/m/yyyy) format.
- Added caching of the current day's prayer times so when the user reboots the machine, the service becomes unavailable upon reboot, and the user's local time is within the current day's prayer times, the gadget will continue to function for the day.
Version 2.8.2.0
- Fixed a bug where the values on the "Parms" tab weren't validating correctly.
- Made some minor modifications to the ui of the settings dialog, in particular updating the custom latitude/longitude input, displaying the calender popups for daylight savings time in the center of the dialog so it isn't clipped, and some css changes.
- Refactored some javascript code.
Version 2.8.1.0
- Fixed a bug where the gadget was auto configuring on reboot even after the user configured the gadget via the options dialog.
Version 2.8.0.0
- The minor bug that was referenced in the change notes for Version 2.6.0.0 was not fixed entirely. Calculating prayer times past Isha time on one's local machine for locations 13+ hours ahead actually skipped a day in cases where the UTC time of one's location was on the following day.
- Fixed a bug which was introduced by the auto configuration capability that prevented prayer times for custom latitude and longitude locations from being calculated.
- Added a flyout that is toggled when the Qibla direction is clicked on the gadget and displays its configured location and Qibla direction.
- Upgraded to jquery-1.7.1 and jquery-ui-1.8.16.
Version 2.7.0.0
- Fixed a problem with the gadget build powershell script which kept the prayer gadget settings javascript functionality in my "debug" mode, so any service call from there was going to my machine's localhost web services instead of the actual internet web services. So all of the functionality for setting one's location was broken for everyone except me. I would never have known it until I downloaded the gadget to my laptop and determined the problem there. What a convoluted bug! I'm just glad I found it as quickly as possible, only the day after I released 2.6.0.0 which is effectively useless.
Version 2.6.0.0
- Added the ability to play the adhan dua after the adhan has finished.
- Added one time auto configuration of the current location and its prayer times on gadget add.
- Added the ability to select mobile auto configuration, which refreshes the current location and its prayer times after a 0.1 degree change in latitude or longitude is detected.
- Fixed the prayer times service to calculate the correct prayer times for any location in the world, from any location in the world.
- NOTE: If you had downloaded this version prior to 7:10 pm EST on December 25, 2011, please download it again as the version I uploaded had a minor bug in it that incorrectly highlighted the next prayer time and displayed an incorrect countdown time for locations 13+ hours ahead of EST, such as Tokyo, Japan, although the prayer time calculations were correct. I had initially uploaded the version with the minor bug around 4 pm EST and didn't want to upgrade to a new version for this minor fix.
Version 2.5.0.0
- Fixed the Dhuhr prayer name to display Jummah instead of Dhuhr for Friday when blink prayer message was turned on.
- Worked around a javascript bug in Windows Sidebar that was causing it to crash.
Version 2.4.0.0
- Fixed a bug with the location display in both the gadget and the settings dialog.
- Fixed a bug with the display of the settings dialog when searching for a location and the service isn't available.
- Fixed a bug where the duration for the adhan was being set for too long when played in the settings dialog.
- Fixed the Dhuhr prayer name to display Jummah for Friday.
Version 2.3.0.0
- Fixed a bug where a user specified adhan file couldn't be chosen because it was causing an error when the settings dialog was closed.
- Upgraded javascript to use the latest version of jQuery (1.4.4) and jQuery ui (1.8.6)
- Added a volume control for the adhan.
Version 2.2.0.0
- Fixed a bug where some common locations weren't being found, such as Cairo, Egypt.
- Fixed a bug where the floating point values for GMT offset weren't being considered for certain locations, such as Bombay, India.
Version 2.1.0.0
- Major code refactor.
- Fixed a bug where the Asr Shadow Ratio wasn't being set correctly.
- Fixed a display issue in undock mode for large city names.
- Fixed a display issue in undock mode for large Hijri date names.
- Fixed a display issue with the prayer times blink message when switching from dock to undock mode and vice versa.
Version 2.0.0.0
- Added undock functionality that displays the gadget differently than when it is in docked mode.
- Fixed a bug in the "Stone" theme.
Version 1.0.0.6
- Updated theme stylesheets to use divs for the prayer times display instead of a table. Also, made other stylesheet changes that conform to the proper way of doing things.
Version 1.0.0.5
- Fixed a bug where the new version information on the settings dialog wasn't being displayed for saved settings.
- Fixed a bug for negative longitudes on custom location selection.
- Major code refactor.
Version 1.0.0.4
- Caching on the server caused version 1.0.0.3 of the gadget to not properly obtain the latest gadget version information. Therefore, it will not notify the user that new version is available unless the IE browser cache is cleared. This issue has been fixed in this version.
- Added the capability to download a new version from the gadget settings if one is available by providing a download link on the "Location" tab.
- Some code was refactored.
Version 1.0.0.3
- Corrected gadget versioning information in the gadget xml file.
- Some code was refactored.
Version 1.0.0.2
- Added versioning information to the settings dialog.
- Added the capability to download a new version directly from the gadget if one is available by providing a download link that displays for five seconds after the gadget is configured.
Version 1.0.0.1
- Fixed a bug with the display update caused by UK locations.

Technical Details

Initially, this gadget was created as a Windows Vista Sidebar Gadget. Its code was then refactored to be configurable in a standard web environment. Since the code for sidebar gadgets is written in javascript, this was not a difficult process. However, as anyone who is familiar with code refactoring will tell you, it can be quite a lengthy one. As part of the refactoring process, I also used the excellent javascript library jQuery written by John Resig which I am using for this site as well. The gadget is basically a prayer times calculator that performs some complex mathematical calculations related to astronomy to determine the daily prayer times for Muslims who reside in a particular location of the world. That is, any location that Google Maps can find as the gadget uses its web service to perform the location search to obtain geographical information necessary to calculate the prayer times. Other geographical information such as timezone and elevation are obtained through the Earth Tools web service. If a location cannot be found, then explicit values can be given for the latitude and longitude necessary to determine the prayer times, although they could be less accurate because other geographic information, such as location elevation, may not be able to be determined.

The code that is used to do the calculation was not written by me, but was obtained after browsing the internet after several hours. I don't understand fully, or even marginally, the complex mathematical calculations that are used to determine the prayer times. The library used was the "Islamic Tools Library" developed in C by Arabeyes' that I believed would be the most accurate. Of course, coming from someone who doesn't understand the mathematical formulas that are used to calculate the values, feel free to take my accuracy assessment with a grain of salt. I ported the code to C# as this is the language I currently develop in, and verified the accuracy of calculations by comparing them against those of the various different locations around the world as determined by a multitude of pre-existing websites, including some of those that probably use the same C code library that I ported, behind the scenes. I believe I also verified my ported code against the existing code, but I can't really remember as software developers have a relatively short memory when it comes to code. Thus, the need for verbose comments in the code to help us remember what we were doing merely one month ago. The port was done several months before I started to write the Windows sidebar gadget.

The prayer times gadget can be configured to call the ported C# code that does all the heavy lifting in two distinct ways:

Using Microsoft's Component Object Model (COM) via the creation of an automation object.
Using a Window's Communication's Foundation (WCF) REST service via Ajax using jQuery.

The difference between the two is that, in the first case, the DLL and type library must reside on the machine that the gadget was installed on, and so would necessitate more disk space, as well as a registration process by the user via "regasm", so that the COM automation infrastructure would have the required information about the DLL in order to create it. Whereas, in the second case, the DLL would not need to reside on the user's local machine, but would exist on a web server and be accessed via HTTP. The advantage of the first case is that if the gadget is configured with geographical location information (which requires internet access to obtain it because it uses external web services), any further internet access will be unnecessary because the calculation DLL resides on the user's local machine. However, I do not expose this library as part of the Windows sidebar gadget download because of the added complexity of user installation and its larger download size. Also, it isn't needed because most people have internet access 99% of the time, and internet access is only required if the settings are changed, or the next day's prayer times need to be obtained after the last prayer time of the day has past.

One thing to note about the implementation details concerning the second case, where jQuery's Ajax functionality is used to call the WCF REST service, is the fact that the WCF services expect JSON serialized dates to be in a specific format. The standard json2.js file from JSON.org does not "stringify" the javascript dates in a format that is expected by the DataContractSerializer of the .NET framework. In order to perform this serialization, I used Rick Strahl's modified version of the json2.js as explained here that performs the specialized stringify for dates so they can be deserialized correctly on the server side in order to work with WCF.

Two other differences between the gadget in Windows and standard web mode:

Audio sounds are played using Windows Media player ActiveX control in Widows mode, or using Scott Schiller's SoundManager 2 in standard web mode.
Windows mode doesn't have the Glass theme due to a bug in the Windows Sidebar concerning transparency issues.

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