Hi there,
I haven’t actually written a blog post for a long time detailing what I have been getting up to lately, so I have decided I would like to mix it up a bit and inform you of an exciting project I have been working on for the past month.
Background
Sometime in April, Perry (who you may know from older videos on my YouTube channel), had an idea to create some kind of Padgett Messages App for mobile devices, and he shared the idea with a couple of us. We instantly and emphatically felt that it was a great idea and could benefit many people not only immediately, but in the long run too, and mentioned that he get cracking on the idea ASAP.
Perry went away, conducted some preliminary research but soon after got discouraged by the potential costs in getting such an app built after speaking with an app development company (they quoted him GBP 15,000!), but also feeling daunted at the prospect of learning mobile phone development himself as an alternative route, and time constraints (as he currently is in employment which takes up 40 hours of his week), and not being able to see any other possibilities, early enthusiasm cooled off and he put the project on the back-burners.
Until a month ago, the thought of working on the project together didn’t even occur to me as I had worked with Perry beforehand on prior projects, and after receiving some feedback from Jesus & Mary about our own co-dependant addictions amongst other things, I felt “safer” in just concentrating on my own projects, rather than risking we get into and act out the same unloving patterns as we did before, which by the way had the potential to cause a catastrophic negative impact upon not only ourselves, but other people if it wasn’t for Jesus & Mary’s intervention, which I am so very grateful about.
However, once I started feeling some big emotions that I had been wanting to avoid for a long time, I realised my own (what I thought responsible approach), was completely ridiculous. In fact, my own sense of pride, emotional injuries with other men, and fears surrounding the area of money was actually acting in an antagonistic manner to a real and true soul desire within me, to ways in which I could share Divine Truth, whilst at the same time, creating avenues and opportunities for other people to follow the path.
I was putting my own self importance, fears and justifications to not act, ahead of my own personal desire to help in the growth of God’s Truth on the planet. Because of this, I totally could not see an opportunity that was right there in front of me. An opportunity that wasn’t about me, but about sharing the truth that has already been presented to the world, in an alternative, current way using the technological advancements that were not available at the time the original messages were received. From my own current condition, I could not see one drawback to working on the project, but only positives after positives, so long as I took all the lessons and feedback I had been learning in the past, forwards to this new project.
App overview, features, functions and general information
I had some personal savings that I wanted to donate to the project, and was willing to pay an app development company to do the technical computer programming on our behalf if needed, and I got in touch with Perry and asked whether he was interested to work together. We met up, shared our ideas about the app (features, functions), created a plan and began conducting more in depth research about how we could make this idea a reality.
Some features we are hoping the app will include are:
- An easy to use filter system so users can read messages according to category, date received and/or spirit author e.g. a user only wants to read messages by Apostle Paul about immortality received in 1917, or simply just wants to read all messages by Jesus, regardless of date received or category.
- A favourites function and page allowing for any single message to be favourited and then stored as a list on the user’s favourites page for future reading/study
- Share messages via a copy to clipboard option which allows the user to share any messages stemming from their own desire using their device’s native features and other apps (e.g. WhatsApp)
- “Offline” availability so the user only needs an internet connection to initially download the app. All features and functions apart from share options will still be available to the user, internet connection or not.
- An automated notification system where users can schedule either a daily, weekly or monthly push notification message to their device at a time of the day e.g. when they first wake up. This feature is entirely set and governed by each user themselves, in order to receive a message at random from the database.
- Some messages are linked to others either because they form part of a series of messages, or refer to previous messages that Padgett received, so a “Related Message” icon will become available for users to select and be taken to those linked messages.
- In built dictionary so users can obtain definitions of any particular words either by a dictionary within the app, or using their device’s own native dictionary “word look-up” feature, depending on device.
We are aiming for the app to be highly functional, yet simple and user friendly which will not distract the user from the actual content of the messages themselves, which are the most important thing. We hope this gift may offer people greater opportunities to interact with and benefit from the messages in a different way and increase accessibility and usability of the messages.
There is much scope for future features to be written into the app at any point (even once the app is “live”), and there is much scope for the app itself to be extended to contain a lot of Divine Truth material as created by Jesus & Mary too.
I will provide update blog posts during the build to keep people who are interested updated along the way of our progress, and once complete, provide a link to the app store download page, list a breakdown of costs incurred during the creation and development of the app itself, and the yearly technology fees (app store fees, server fees etc) which would be payable to ensure the app remains available as a gift to the world.
We will be also creating a specific “central” website related to the app at some point soon, which we reckon will be easier for everybody to follow and receive information about the project, rather than being spread over each of our personal websites. I will share details here once this has been set up.
We are offering the app for free as a gift to the world, so long as you have a suitable device to make use of the gift, which is initially being offered to iOS & Android mobile phones (as these two platforms are the most used by the general population).
A simple donate option will be available within the app itself and the funds received would go towards yearly app store fees and technology costs in the first instance, potential future additions and improvements e.g. release to other platforms or devices such as iPad, Windows phone depending on the amount of donations received, and any remainders to help contribute to personal basic living requirements (food, water, shelter).
Back to the Project
As with all things, I quickly found that there were a heck of a lot of considerations to investigate, which initially weren’t so obvious at the beginning, including but not limited to the areas of technology, costs, time and energy we’d invest into the idea, as well always bearing in mind Divine Truth principles as taught by J&M, but also my understanding of God’s Principles and Laws as the foundations that we could somehow build the app upon.
Part of the process involved us speaking with, and receiving proposals from around 20 or so app development companies. During this process, we learnt so much about the technical considerations of the build, the different types of development technologies from speaking with people who had knowledge in the area.
After this process, we were going to decide which app company to work with based on their proposal (technology used, frameworks, cost, timescales, general feel of the company and their own motivations and intentions etc), but we both had the thought to get in touch with Jesus, briefly share the idea and ask for any suggestions that we could not see. Gratefully he wrote back, said it was a great idea and suggested to approach Kate Eckersall, a friend of mine I had met and got to know a little during my time on the Divine Truth Volunteer Training Programme, and ask whether she’d be interested in a joint venture with us.
Jesus shared that Kate had been volunteering to Divine Truth for the past year on programming tasks and was a good programmer amongst other things, and suggested we consider potentially donating to her personal living expenses whilst she worked on building the app. I have a bit of an idea about how much it takes (in terms of desire to serve others, work as part of a team, have a good work ethic etc) to be part of the volunteer team for either DT or God’s Way after my time in Australia towards the back end of last year going into the start of this year, (which Jesus mentioned I wouldn’t qualify for, at the time), so I knew I could rely on this recommendation.
Both Perry & I agreed this was much the better option. It felt more in harmony with the way we wanted to do things (in terms of developing our own understanding of technical things and being more self responsible rather than just paying an app company to do most of the things on our behalf), but also Kate herself loves DT and has been following the teachings for 7 years, and has a passion to help share DT too.
We got in touch with Kate, who was also very excited about the project and wanted to offer her programming skills to the build. We have since been working together and conducted even more research, Kate has shared with us the challenges from a technical programming perspective, which has been incredibly useful and insightful to our own learning (and in fact, developing mobile apps is new for Kate too, so she is learning a lot of stuff for the first time as well).
We figured creating the app this way, would also provide us with opportunities to document as much of the process as possible, which could be useful for others to learn in the future, such as creating a website and setting up a hosting solution on Amazon Web Services (AWS) for example.
Hitting the books during the Categorisation process – carrot juice in hand!
Perry & I have just begun categorising and tagging the messages in an excel sheet Kate has kindly set up, which we hope will allow the filter function to work off of through a database. It is no easy feat as we have to work our way through 1,152 messages, making sure we accurately tag each one! However luckily for us, our partners Becks & Courtney have volunteered to help us with this task, which we greatly appreciate, thanks guys! We hope that us doing this part of the project will give Kate more time to work on the programming element of the app, which will take some time.
From a monetary view, I have been and am totally happy with donating my personal funds to the development of this project, and do not expect to receive any support in this regard. However, if you are interested in the project and also share our passion and excitement of the prospect of having this app available to you but also the world and wish to support us in our work, you can donate by visiting my donate page on this website.
As the funds going into the project are being donated entirely by myself at this point, and I have no obligations or demands that people donate to the cause, it seems more prudent and practical for us to receive donations towards the project via my donation page, at this point. These contributions will then help me subsidise my own donations to the project (from Kate’s living expenses through to server and website costs etc). I have updated the activity table on my donation page to include this project, amongst the other things I am currently doing to share Divine Truth.
At some point down the track, once the app is built and live, you will be able to personally donate to either Kate, Perry and/or myself, and we will be putting a breakdown of what we each contributed to the project for your information. Alternatively, you could just donate to us separately at this point if you so wished, by following the hyperlinks in this blog post which will direct you to our respective website donation pages.
I’d like to thank Kate and Perry for the opportunity to be involved in the project with them, and also to Jesus for his suggestions at a very important time.
That’s all for now, I’d like to thank you for reading, there’s a lot of work ahead!
‘Til next time,
Love,
Nicky