- daily office for morning, evening, compline
- full psalter
- table for daily scrripture readings and suggested readings from the BOC.
- daily prayers. Perhaps something like Lutheran Book of Prayer – recurring prayers for each day of the week but for each season of the church year. maybe a set A and set B for longer seasons.
- special prayers.

Basically something between the Treasury of Prayer and the Lutheran Book of Prayer in size and content.

$40 is a psychological tipping point for me – but I'd probably spend even that. I really, really want it. But I'm guessing you'll have more success if it's priced below that. I think there are medical reference texts that are priced there or higher in the App Store.

I've tried to sketch out a few times in brief what an app like this would look like and it's not the easiest thing in the world. The Olive Tree apps come pretty close, but they violate a few general iPhone usability guidelines.

However, as one planning to get an iPhone I would willingly spend $30 (or even the same price as the print copy) to get a TDP for the iPhone.

Pr. Esget's suggestion regarding the Olive Tree interface sounds great.

I'd think a digital text priced in the neighborhood of 65-75% of the printed text is not unreasonable.

I'd argue against having it contact a server for anything, though. Ideally it should be contained on the iPhone/iPod without needing network connectivity. You should be able to program the app to work with the movable dates as you can figure these out into the future for X number of years without much difficulty. It wouldn't take too much to make the program “smart,” though this may be beyond the current capability of OliveTree.

Now, the big question: how much would you be willing to pay for a digital TDP? In other words, it is very difficult for us to afford to price digital texts at a price point that is not pretty close to the print price, but I can feel for the buyers of the print edition who would balk at shelling out $35-40 for a digital edition. Tis a conundrum.

I'm guessing that you'd want to start with the "base" of Matins or Vespers, and then be able to tap on, say, "Psalm" to get that day's Psalmody, then "Readings" to get that day's readings to pop up. The same thing could be done for Hymns and the Writing (in place of the sermon). I presume you could use the internal date of the iPhone/iPod Touch to put you in the right day. Now that I think of it, that would only work for half of the year. Maybe the program could communicate with a server to find the correct liturgical day during the Ash Wednesday through Trinity part of the year. Or that could be user-entered in the "Settings" area, with a field, "Today is:" with the slot-machine scrolling thingy set to (for today) "Tuesday–Easter 3."

I was using a papistic Breviary program for the iPhone before I got the TDP. With that program, it essentially downloaded the correct readings, hymnody, etc. each day. That caused a short wait, but it might be more efficient than cramming all that data on the phone. I really don't know the best way, technically, to do it. But I have no doubts that you can find someone smart to get it done. I'd easily pay $20-$30 dollars for an app like that. Good apps are worth the money.

Another option, I suppose, is to work with someone like Olive Tree on this. They have the experience with designing an iPhone app that works very well, and a delivery system from within their app.

Maybe it's not economically viable. I'm guessing there's a market for it. It would be a killer way to take advantage of new technology and potentially reach a different kind of market. You guys have done an incredible job with your products the last few years; I have no doubts you could do this if you think it's worthwhile.