An iPad on the Wall of Your Shul?
Buy an iPad, download a $300 app, and hang it up on the wall of your shul. Or, at least, that’s what Moshe Berman wants you to do.
Berman, an unassuming 21 year old college student, has been developing apps for Apple products for three years. Most of his apps are geared toward the frum community. Want to know the zemanim for your location, anywhere in the world? Want to watch or listen to Rabbi Bentzion Shafier’s lecture series The Shmuz? Moshe Berman has an app for that.
Now Berman has published an app that converts the iPad into a digital shul display, akin to the increasingly popular displays populating shul walls throughout the world. Dubbed “Gabbai”, the app automatically updates and displays zemanim based on the Hebrew date and location of the shul. A number of customizable features allow today’s gabbai to add yartzheit notifications, pictures, and any other shul announcement for Gabbai to display.
When I first heard about Gabbai, I was skeptical. To me, the iPad is a great tool for on the go computing, a perfect medium between a smartphone and a laptop. But a wall display? It seemed too small, almost like a postage stamp on a wall. I couldn’t see it. Until I saw it.
I met Mr. Berman in a coffee shop in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan. I’ve always felt that the straightforward approach is the best approach, so I was upfront with my skepticism. Berman responded by leaping from his chair, walking his Gabbai-loaded iPad to the other end of the shop. He held it up for my inspection, and I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The words “7:45 Shacharis” jumped out at me from about twenty feet away. I nearly jumped out of my chair myself.
Gabbai’s options are formidable. It comes loaded with about thirty presets, including announcements for daily davening times, the zeman for Shema, and sundown. Davening times are customizable; the times for Shema and sundown are obviously not.
Also included are options for displaying date-specific announcements, such as a “No Tachanun” announcement shown only on days when tachanun is not said. Options like these are selected by default; you can opt out with one or two taps on the touch screen. Custom announcements can also be set to display on a specific day or for a specific date range (e.g. Parnes Hayom or Parnes Hachodesh).
Gabbai is beautiful in its simplicity. Setup menus are sleek and easy to use, and the design of the display is clean yet sophisticated. Options are available for Ashkenaz, Sefard, and Sefaradi minhagim, and the preset announcements can display in Hebrew or English. Selecting English will display announcements with a Modern Hebrew transliteration (i.e. Shacharit, Kriyat Shema). When I questioned this, Berman pointed out that “most places that care about that would probably want it displayed in Hebrew anyway”. He may be right, but I would have liked to see the option.
The iPad itself can be locked to disallow access to any other app, and Gabbai uses an administrative password to change any options. In addition, there is a setting (“Pedestal Mode”) which allows users to swipe from announcement to announcement. Pedestal Mode is selected by default; the other option, Wall Mode, can be selected for Shabbos or if you don’t want fingerprints mucking up the display.
The iPad doesn’t come with a wall mount; accessories like these are sold separately. Lockable secure wall mounts are available online for about $149. In order to disallow access to other apps, opt for a mount which blocks the home button; it is also necessary to disable multitasking gestures (in the iPad Settings menu, tap General).
Gabbai users will also need to buy a longer charger cord; the standard issue charger is about three feet long. That’s just long enough to almost make it. Apple sells a ten foot cable for $29.95, and cheaper options are available elsewhere. I saw a few options under $10 available from Amazon, including a hot pink cable ($5.98 shipped) which may be more appropriate for the women’s section.
Another purchasing consideration is which iPad to get. Gabbai is compatible with iPad 2 or the new iPad, which start from $399 and $499, respectively. The main benefit of the newer model is the Retina display, which boasts significantly sharper images and text. It may be worth the investment. I tested Gabbai on an iPad 2 as well as the new iPad, though not side by side. The app worked fine and was clear and legible on the older model. All told, Gabbai will cost in the ballpark of $900-$1000, plus sales tax, mostly dependent on which model iPad you buy.
For the shul in the market for a zemanim display, there are several options available. The cheapest option is a TV monitor running a slideshow off an SD card. For those not technically inclined (for example, if you didn’t understand the previous sentence), this option is not for you. It involves creating slides on a separate computer using a program like Microsoft Publisher or Powerpoint, saving the slides as image files, transferring them to an SD card, and inserting the card into a compatible monitor. As with most cheap options, this one is very labor-intensive. It requires a certain amount of technical know-how in creating and formatting the slides, and it constantly requires significant time and input whenever any information needs to be changed. This option should cost at least $400 for the screen, mount, and memory card.
The next option also uses a TV monitor, this time powered by an attached computer or netbook safely stowed somewhere nearby. Here the learning curve is less steep: a simple Powerpoint slideshow, which nearly anyone can learn to create and edit, is displayed on the screen. Here, too, input is required whenever a change needs to be made to what is being displayed. Editing here is easier, and can be done with a wireless keyboard and mouse right in front of the monitor. A computer running a slideshow program like Powerpoint is necessary, and the same sort of monitor and mount as the previous option will work fine as a display. Estimated cost: $600-$800.
The most expensive option, by far, is a custom-made LED display board with dedicated spaces for customizable text. Repeated attempts to contact Bee Zee Systems, a company which manufactures these displays, yielded little information. I was unable to find exact pricing information, but the range seems to be somewhere between $2,000 to $10,000. Pictures can not be displayed, though some models do allow custom text for announcements. Some may feel that these boards, many of which are beautifully designed with wood frames and inlays, are more appropriate for a shul than a TV monitor or an iPad. [EDIT: I have since discovered that there are highly customizable full-color models which can display pictures, scrolling text, and much more.]
I found a number of inconveniences and glitches with Gabbai and with the iPad-as-display model in general. Because of the iPad’s relatively small screen, Gabbai only displays one announcement at a time. The amount of time to display each slide is customizable, but shul-goers may appreciate a much larger screen with much more information available at one glance. All the other options provide this. In the default Pedestal Mode, Gabbai users can easily find the announcement they are looking for by swiping sideways.
Adding pictures to Gabbai is a hassle. Pictures can only be added from the iPad’s Camera Roll, which is basically the photo album. To add pictures to Camera Roll, you either need to plug the iPad into a computer and transfer photos through iTunes, or import pictures from email on the iPad, which requires an internet connection. Gabbai also does not allow text and pictures within the same announcement.
The biggest technical issue I found with Gabbai was the inability to customize text layout in custom announcements. There is no simple way to insert a line break (equivalent to hitting “Enter” on a keyboard) or to change text size. I mentioned this to Berman, and he added this functionality to his to-do list. This is a non-issue for any display using a standard slideshow program.
I found Berman relatively open to constructive criticism. When I noticed another glitch (custom yartzheit announcements would not display when I entered more than a handful of characters), Berman declared that an easy fix. He pulled out his laptop, scrolled through a few hundred lines of code, and made a minor modification. A few minutes later he was uploading an update to Apple for approval. That update (1.0.3) is now live on the App Store. Any feedback sent to gabbaiapp@gmail.com routes directly to Berman.
I like Gabbai for its ability to essentially run on its own without regular input and its minimalist, attractive design. It is not the cheapest option available, but it is not nearly the most expensive either. At $299.99, Gabbai’s price may give some pause. Viewed in the context of total cost, it becomes easier to swallow, but a lower price point may be worth Berman’s consideration. For Apple fans, Gabbai certainly has a particular allure: it meshes well with the beauty and simplicity Apple exudes. While not perfect, Gabbai is impressive and will serve most shuls well. With the promise of coming improvements, it can only get better.
A similar version of this post appeared in the March 8, 2013 print edition of The Jewish Press. It is posted here with the permission of The Jewish Press.