Mobile Melodies
One fine Sunday morning, we are up and about our usual routine of doing the final preparations before the church service starts. As we go to set up the projector, we notice that it was dim and not so visible from a distance. We decide to switch to the printed copies which we had set aside for some time after going the digital way.
We went on to distribute the books and we realized that they will not be enough for the number expected to attend service that day. But where did the other books go? Some were put to good use and were worn out, others were curried by members for house-to-house fellowship and are yet to be returned and the rest is what we have at hand. Ultimately, we managed to share the available songbooks, we eventually got another projector and most importantly, the problem gave birth to an idea.
Light bulb moment
After several solutions came to mind, one stood out. This one killed all of the birds with one stone. Even better, it went on and killed the two in the bush, but I will get to that in a moment. The winning idea was if I could make an app that had the English and Swahili songs we sing at church, wouldn’t that solve all of the problems at once? Let’s go through each and see.
- In the event the projector fails or there is no electricity that day, we take out our phones, open the app, and continue singing.
- If its a house to house fellowship, we sing from our phones and not carry the church songbooks
- Or if its a seminar or other combined church events and there are not enough books, people have their phones with them hence the songs as well.
Some time later, I realized that several churches had the same problem while other starting churches did not have songbooks at all, so we suggested the app to them and they liked it. I count that as the second bird I killed with the same stone.
Two in the bush
Closely following the statistics of the number of new users growing and their respective regions, I noticed new users from other countries and more people started using the contact us button in the app to give their suggestions on what to add or improve. With the content of the app being dynamic from the very start, it has been easy to meet the requests of those who suggest songs to be added to the list. Their suggestions have increased the content of the app from around 100 songs at the beginning to about 1500+ songs at the moment with others in the queue.
However, when I indicated that the app is multilingual, I had only considered the songs in English and Swahili but now there are requests to include songs in other languages, the most recent one being Fijian songs. Do I understand the Fijian language? Nope… and neither do I sing Fijian songs but I believe it is possible to include them as part of My SongBooks community and content creators. This is because a good app always focuses about the people and how they understand and use things to solve their daily problems, usually not about the technology behind it. So that’s how I got the two birds in the bush.
Light bulb moment
After several solutions came to mind, one stood out. This one killed all of the birds with one stone. Even better, it went on and killed the two in the bush, but I will get to that in a moment. The winning idea was if I could make an app that had the English and Swahili songs we sing at church, wouldn’t that solve all of the problems at once? Let’s go through each and see.
- In the event the projector fails or there is no electricity that day, we take out our phones, open the app, and continue singing.
- If its a house to house fellowship, we sing from our phones and not carry the church songbooks
- Or if its a seminar or other combined church events and there are not enough books, people have their phones with them hence the songs as well.
Some time later, I realized that several churches had the same problem while other starting churches did not have songbooks at all, so we suggested the app to them and they liked it. I count that as the second bird I killed with the same stone.
Two in the bush
Closely following the statistics of the number of new users growing and their respective regions, I noticed new users from other countries and more people started using the contact us button in the app to give their suggestions on what to add or improve. With the content of the app being dynamic from the very start, it has been easy to meet the requests of those who suggest songs to be added to the list. Their suggestions have increased the content of the app from around 100 songs at the beginning to about 1500+ songs at the moment with others in the queue.
However, when I indicated that the app is multilingual, I had only considered the songs in English and Swahili but now there are requests to include songs in other languages, the most recent one being Fijian songs. Do I understand the Fijian language? Nope… and neither do I sing Fijian songs but I believe it is possible to include them as part of My SongBooks community and content creators. This is because a good app always focuses about the people and how they understand and use things to solve their daily problems, usually not about the technology behind it. So that’s how I got the two birds in the bush.
NB: For bird lovers, no bird was harmed during the development of the app or the writing of this post.
About the app
My Songbooks is a multilingual collection of Christian song lyrics with a dynamic online database and a set of features in the application to help you interact with the content therein. The application has the features below:
- Search a book from a collection.
- View songs inside a book.
- Preview song lyrics.
- Add a song to favorites.
- Filter songs in a book by title or lyrics.
- Update your music database from an online collection.
Here are some screenshots from the app:
