[mobile-devel] Android Status [was: iPhone PocketSword status]

[Troy A. Griffitts]

Well, with Nic's encouraging report and from Barry's lead with the subject All Things Mobile, I'll give a brief status update on the Android front.

First, I'd like to say this has been a real challenge-- more than I had expected, but it's been fun.   I would really love to see your solutions for touch navigation, install gui, footnote/x-ref display, etc. As many of you know, I'm not so creative in the field of aesthetics :)  maybe we could post screen shots and learn from eachother's ideas.

Most of my time has been spent on a user intuitive installation screen backed with InstallMgr. I believe it works fairly well now and includes our 'Auto-discovery of Publishers' function, selection of a publisher and install from a list of their modules. Remove also works. What isn't implemented is a hook to our upgrade/versioning info of installed modules.

I've removed the text to speech feature for now, so Bishop can run on Android 1.5 devices, as many handsets are still on this version (Samsung).

Basic reading and navigation of Bibles works ok. I'm not including a CSS with the content yet and I'm leaving Javascript turned off on our webview component, so you'll see odd 'x' characters where cross-references are located, 'n' for notes, etc.

David Haslam has discovered that font support is limited on stock phones, and as of Android 1.6 we don't know a way to install additional fonts without rooting your phone; my Cyanogen modded G1 has quite a bit better font support, but still not great.

You can try it out at the usual place:

http://crosswire.org/~scribe/bishop.apk

Android emulators are available in the SDK, if you'd like to test but don't have a phone.

Troy

Nic Carter <niccarter at mac.com> wrote:

>
>Hi gang, a quick update on what is happening with PocketSword...  :)
>
>Due to what is happening with Ian Wagner's free time (or lack thereof!), we've decided that I'm going to start taking over the development of PocketSword for the time being.  :)
>
>What this means for those of you who were beta testers (or those of you who want to try out PocketSword on your iPhone or iPod Touch) is that I need to get your UDID (http://www.ispeeddial.com/how-to-find-your-iphone-uuid/ for details) if you want to continue beta testing...  Please send me a private email, not to the mailing list, but to niccarter at mac.com :)
>
>FYI, I've been working on this for the last 1.5 months (which is why you may have seen me post more on this list) & there's currently a very large changelog from the last beta.  I'm hoping to put out a new beta in the middle of next week & some changes include:
>
>- Module installer using the SWORD InstallMgr (including a much improved UI) -> using the new HTTP functionality recently implemented.
>- Method to "manually" add a module (in a zip file) to your iPhone/iPod Touch.
>- Many many many changes to the UI.
>- Preliminary work for av11n (kinda words, not a priority for v1.0).
>- More options in settings.
>- New commentary tab, so you can have a Bible & commentary open at the same time.
>- Many many many changes behind the scenes to make the above happen & to allow more fun things for v1.1
>
>Feature requests for v1.0 are probably closed & I've got a long list of ideas for v1.1 which is very flexible atm  :)
>
>Until we sort out what's happening with the website, I have thrown together a 5 minute effort at: http://web.me.com/niccarter/PocketSword/
>
>Thanks all, ybic
>	nic...  :)
>
>ps:  A quick intro for you all:  My name is Nic Carter & I was born in Canada, raised in Sydney, Australia, have lived in Hong Kong for a few years and I'm now residing back in Sydney.  Means my time zone is probably fairly different to some of you, but I'm good with communicating across timezones & great with email  :)
>I'm considering heading to the US for BibleTech:2010 (http://www.bibletechconference.com/) next March, as a couple of friends are getting married nearby a few days later.  Is anyone from here planning on being there?
>
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