The Baal Shem Tov, or Besht —  the founder of Chasidism — 
met the soul of the Messiah during an ascent to heaven. 
The Besht asked him, "When will the Master come?" 
The Messiah answered, "When your wellsprings break forth to the outside!" 
(from a letter written by the Besht to his brother-in-law about one of his soul ascents) 


 

iPhone OMER COUNTER

Get the neohasid iPhone app Omer Counter from the App store! (Click here for everything OMER on neohasid—widgets, Rainbow Day, blessing the trees, etc.)

David Cooper created an iPhone app based on the javascript I wrote for the omer widget, and implemented an idea I always wanted to do: in addition to the count and the Sefirah for each day, the Tree of the Sefirot appears with a ring around the Sefirah of the week and a circle inside for the Sefirah of the day. David also added the formula for the count and blessing in Hebrew, English and transliteration, and made it so that the count will change according to sunset in your actual location. In 2011 I began the process of adding a quote for each day. There will be an update to that this year as well.

Currently the app switches day and date at 2am local computer time. That's a legacy from the Omer widget (see explanation below). The next update will switch to sunrise/sunset times using precise GPS. Make sure you download the app and you'll get the update information when it comes out.

Follow the links below to go straight to the App store and install the app. Or just search in the App store under "omer" – you'll find two versions, one free and one paid (the paid one is a small donation to neohasid). WISH LIST: We need someone to help make versions for Android! (and Windows Phone, and dare I suggest Blackberry?) Contact us if you can help.

Screenshot:



Here are the links:

Paid version

Free version

Links open itunes store. You can search "omer counter" and "omer count" if you're on your iPhone and the links don't work.

Please make a donation if you appreciate this app! Thank you.


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Joseph Smith from England asked me April 5, 2013 why the iPhone app switches days at 2am, and the reason is entirely a legacy from the Omer count widget. I thought I shoud put the explanation on both pages for people to look at.

Our developer David Cooper is going to do switch the app so that it changes at precise sunrise/sunset times using the iPhone's GPS, and that update may be available soon.

I started looking at the original program the app was based on and remembered how it ended up the way it did, with the day switching at 2am. That program was a web widget written in javascript, which means it reads the time zone of the local computer clock to determine the day. Since that doesn't include latitude and longitude it wouldn't be possible to get precise sunset and sunrise times (and the truth is that even if it did have that I wouldn't have known how to do it at the time.

So that means there's going to be some time where it might be confusing. If the app says "tonight is day x" during the daytime, then someone looking at the widget knows to count the previous number for the day. If it were to say "today is day x" during the daytime it would have to switch over precisely at nightfall in order for people using it then to count right. If it said "tonight is day x" without a date, then during the daytime people might be confused about whether it referred to the previous night and daytime or the coming evening. Then during the day for people who missed counting at night might count the wrong number. If it has a date, then the date would switch over at midnight but the count would remain the same until the following evening, another source of confusion.

I decided to specify the day of the week and give the day in terms of "Tuesday eve" or "Saturday eve", which would make clear which part of the night was the reference point, and then people could extrapolate from that. I had it switch days at 2am because I figured that would screw up fewer people, and those up at 3AM on Thursday would hopefully notice that the day count said "Friday eve" (actually "Fri eve" to save space").

I could have had it say "today is day x and tonight is day y" or had it switch a little before morning from "tonight is day x" to "tonight will be day y". I think the latter might be a viable solution. The former is too many words for the format the widget used, which you can see at neohasid.org/omer/omercount/. Im spelling this all out for you because it helps me figure out what to do. Your feedback is of course welcome.

Once we incorporate GPS into the app though, we can have it switch precisely at sunrise and/or sunset. The javascript widget however will still have this limitation, and the current state of the app is a legacy from the widget.

posted by: Rabbi David Seidenberg, April 5, 2013

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Design in progress © Rabbi David Mevorach Seidenberg 2006