Introduction
Taoist Meditations is intended as a resource for enlightening material and useful tools for meditation. Since I meditate on a regular basis I chose to make a phone app that would benefit my daily practice. This Windows Phone application currently provides five useful tools for enhancing your meditation experience. It has passed the submission tests and entered the marketplace as of July 11th, 2011. I used this app to learn the process of including advertisements inside a phone app and setting up an ad service account. It was also helpful to work with xaml again and use the Visual Studio development environment.
Favorites
This section is a bulletin board for placing your most commonly used mantras or your most referenced beliefs and passages. It is organized into a list format with a title and text for each section. It is a relatively simple construct from a programming perspective, but it was helpful in learning Model-View-ViewModel and applying databinding.
Quotes
This sections produces random user-generated quotes that a user can ponder when meditating. I start the user out with 34 quotes but the user has the options of deleting the ones he/she doesn’t like and adding new ones. The user can also edit quotes. The editing process was especially helpful for learning the app re-hydration process and using the State dictionary to persist information while the app is being tombstoned.
Tao Te Ching
This section produces random passages from the Tao Te Ching. The user can also copy a passage from the Tao Te Ching to the clipboard to put in the favorites section or for use in other applications and can view all 88 passages at once to find one he/she is particularly fond of.
Meditation Timer
This is pretty self-explanatory. If one is under a time constraint (such as in the morning before work) it is better to set a timer and focus on the act of meditation rather than constantly looking at a watch or clock. The timer goes from one minute to an hour and allows you to play, pause and stop the clock. It is able to run behind the lock screen and the alarm is a very unobtrusive sound and vibration to bring one out of meditation peacefully.
Reference List
This is a list of website links. There is a lot of useful meditation information on the internet and it was helpful for me to have all of my most commonly used links in one place. Thestructure of this section is very similar to that of the Favorites section. I have set up the app with some of my favorite links but users once again have th ability to add, delete and edit any of the entries as well as move them up or down the list. At the bottom of this section I have placed a small ad.