iSamadhi 1.2 has been approved! This release includes some major new features that we are very excited about.
Music!!:
I know a lot of meditators. I know many who perfer to meditate in silence, and I know many more who like to meditate to music or listen to guided meditations. When iSamadhi was released, we wanted to support any style of meditation and so we were careful to make sure that the App did not interfere with the iPod playback in any way. As we used iSamadhi over the months, we realized that while this was great, it was not the optimal experience. For example, if you wanted to do a guided meditation you had to start the audio in the iPod App, exit that App, then find and switch to iSamadhi, wait for it to load, then start your meditation there. Way too many steps! If you had a favorite playlist or album to meditate to, perhaps you could forgive the steps ... but then when you wanted to skip a song, you were screwed! Unless you had headphones with a remote or setup the double-tap home button to show iPod controls, you had to exit the app to skip the song, effectively ending your session.
Well, all of that is now over. With iSamadhi 1.2 we are introducing something that no other iPhone Meditation App has: Integrated Music Playlists! Now it is possible (and easy!) to add music to each meditation Preset you create. When you start your meditation, the music will start at the same time! If you had setup a preparation time, the music or guided meditation will wait until that time is over. Controls for skipping or replaying tracks are conveniently placed on the Timer screen. Wondering whats playing now? Just tap anywhere on the Timer window and show a 'now playing' banner. Tap again to hide it.
Boom!! I just blew your mind!
Journal Export:
This was a very popular request from our users. If you have Mail setup on your device, you can now export your journal via email. The email will contain a file attachment in CSV format, which can be easily imported into all sorts of desktop applications like Excel, Numbers, Pages, Word, etc. etc.
Improvements:
We increased the tap-target size of the Preset edit button. Hopefully this will reduce the frustration of accidently starting a meditation, when you really just wanted to edit the Preset. We continue to work on this one to try and make it work perfectly, as it is still easy to "roll" your finger onto the row from the side and actually be hitting row instead of the button. However I think this change does improve the experience by a large measure.
We fixed a rare but annoying bug that caused your device to go to sleep and stop timing your meditation when certain other conditions existed. This was actually caused by a bug in the iPhone OS 3.0 software, but I was never able to recreate the condition successfully myself until just recently. Not only did we fix this, but we now include the ability to allow the device to sleep the screen, and keep timing your meditation.
Other Improvements:
The ability to adjust the chime volume without interfering with your device volume.
The divided interval chime now supports an between 2 and 21 divisions, rather than the static 3,6 or 9 that was avialable before.
Future:
What!? Stop here and take a load off you say?? Are you crazy!! We aren't stopping here! We still believe there is lots of room for improvement and innovation. We have some great ideas, and we are really excited about the future. I can't share all of our plans right now, but keep checking back and *maybe* something will slip here or there.
A final note of thanks to all of our users, to those who wrote in requesting features and pointing out bugs, and to our Teachers: Thank you! The value of your support, encouragement and empowerment cannot be over stated. Thank you, Thank you; A thousand times: Thank You!
