1/28/10

Jewish Prayer Software Review: Kavvanah-Kavanah for Windows

Review of "Kavanah Improvement Project" for Windows from Yosi Fishkin, MD. Free. Download at www.GoDaven.com for Windows and Palm PDAs.


Program Description: Kavanah Improvement Project is the first program that provides a complete system designed to help you improve your Kavanah during davening. The program provides daily Kavanah exercises to help you strengthen your Kavanah, helps you track you Kavanah over time, and, based on your progress, it provides customized suggestions to help you improve your particular Kavanah situation.


Review: First off we usually spell it "kavvanah" with two vees. That said, after downloading the program when you go to install it, it will first download and install the .NET Framework 2.0 from Microsoft. Once that is done and the program is opened you get a nice simple menu with an appropriate background.
Your choice of Tip of the Day will give you a new tip each day. The Evaluate choice lets you choose Shacharis, Mincha or Maariv and enter your self-appraisal, from one to ten. The program instructions give you some suggestions for setting your standards, such as, "An evaluation of kavanah is, by its very nature, extremely subjective. It will also vary greatly from person to person, depending on what level of kavanah you already achieve. What one person would consider to be an 8/10, another person would consider to be a 3/10."
K4W keeps track of your data and allows you to evaluate your progress over time, helping with suggestions. We haven't used it long enough to assess the value of those. The report interface is simple and helpful.

Recommendation: Overall this is a neat tool. I give it a 10/10 rating! Thanks to Yitz for tipping us off on this great idea in 10/06. (repost)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Seems a little silly to me.

Anonymous said...

I think it's a great idea - I've been using it, and it works!