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Rylan Evans, developer of LDS-Family Home Evening Tools, said his app has made FHE more meaningful for his family.

Courtesy of Rylan Evans

Pleasant Grove resident Rylan Evans sits down with his wife and four kids for family home evening on a Mon night. It'south his viii-twelvemonth-old's turn to plan FHE, this fourth dimension on the Starting time Vision. In less than a minute the child had everything planned for the gathering — the lesson, song, scripture and even the activity — thanks to his dad's family unit home evening app.

"Families now, with our fast-paced world that we live in, everybody is so busy with teenagers in and out. You can simply say who is going to be attending, pick your songs, and everything is ready to go," said Evans, a member of The Church building of Jesus Christ of Latter-mean solar day Saints. "Information technology besides brings a whole new class of structure that the traditional family home evening doesn't exercise."

Evans' app, LDS-Family Home Evening Tools, is designed to make planning and executing FHE more than effective and user-friendly for members of the church. It was released for iPhone and iPad users on February. 5 and is gratuitous to download.

Users can stick with the traditional song, scripture and lesson, or they can customize FHE with new elements such every bit family unit rules, calendaring, begetting testimony and spotlighting someone who did something overnice that week, Evans said. The app is designed to be displayed on a Goggle box for everyone to follow forth.

"In that location'southward nothing else like it," he said of the app.

The LDS-Family Home Evening Tools app allows users to program FHE quickly and finer.

Courtesy of Rylan Evans

Steve Wirrick, an LDS member from Sammamish, Washington, has iii daughters ages 12, ix and vii. He said he likes the style the app walks them through stride by pace with embedded multimedia straight from Mormon Aqueduct to keep the kids engaged.

"For those that find it hard to craft a family home evening, I retrieve it's the ultimate tool of convenience," he said. "Even if you were on the road or at a park or doing something exterior, it enables you to accept a absurd feel because all those tools are right at your fingertips."

Wirrick said navigating the app was a little bit of a learning curve initially due to the many categories to cull from, merely in that location is a way to disable certain items when planning the calendar if y'all desire to keep information technology simple, he said.

"The best thing about the app, also, is that you can really delegate family habitation evening to one of the kids and they can pull it off because it's all laid out for them," Wirrick said.

He said he also plans to apply the app as a backup when he is asked to be a terminal-minute substitute in Primary. The key for him, he said, is beingness able to search by topic so he doesn't accept to become "hunting" for content.

The search feature was also of import to Evans, who created and linked to enough content for more than than two years of weekly family home evenings without duplication.

Evans, an independent app developer, said the app came from "years of tinkering" and agreement process evolution such as basic formulas in Microsoft Excel. A University of Washington alumnus, Evans has worked as a process-improvement managing director in which he said he "finds ways to automate things and make things amend."

"My idea came from doing my own family unit abode evenings and realizing there has got to be a better style than just everybody using our fiddling LDS charts that nosotros all hang our names from and rotate," Evans said.

"How can I make this more robust with engineering?" he thought.

In June 2017, Evans enrolled in classes at DevMountain coding school in Salt Lake Metropolis for 4 months, where he received formal training in IOS development and Swift, a programming language that makes IOS apps.

He had spent about a year and a half working on spreadsheets to pull available resources and lessons together. One time he started working on the app, Evans said it took about six months from beginning to finish.

DevMountain IOS program director Andrew Madsen served as Evans' mentor in the program. Madsen said he tested the app and it works well for his family.

"I think he's done a great job picking a problem he has in his own life and figuring out a solution to information technology, something that makes life easier for him and hopefully for other people," Madsen said. "It as well shows he's put a ton of work into it. I've had hundreds of students, and this is among the meliorate apps I've seen from a educatee or recent graduate."

Evans said he plans on keeping the app complimentary every bit content comes direct from LDS.org.

"It's my fashion of giving back to the community and what I cherish nearly in my family," Evans said.

FHE-Family Domicile Evening Tools can be found in the Apple tree App Store and downloaded here.

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Source: https://www.deseret.com/2018/2/7/20639542/how-one-lds-dad-gave-family-home-evening-an-electronic-face-lift-with-a-new-app

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