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<p>Dear team,</p>
<p>You all know we've been working on Cordova bindings for SWORD for
quite some time now. We now have a simple reader written in
JavaScript which will run unchanged on both Android and iOS.Bishop
includes an InstallMgr to auto-discover remote installation
sources and let a user install SWORD content.</p>
<p>I've kept the development code name "Bishop", my favorite android
(from Aliens) and almost appropriate for a Bible app :) I've also
tacked on our boring moniker from our Windows app, "Bishop: The
SWORD Project for Android". Long name but should get more search
hits.</p>
Basically, Bishop's UI has 2 basic modes:<br>
<blockquote><b>Reader</b>: which simply shows 1 chapter of up to 3
Bibles in parallel.<br>
<b>Verse</b> <b>Study</b>: When in reader mode, as the user
scrolls, one verse will always be active, when "Verse Study" is
chosen from the menu, the user can then drill down into that
active verse. Verse Study has 4 tools:<b><br>
</b>
<blockquote><b>Word</b> <b>Study</b>: shows the verse broken down
word by word, showing the original Greek or Hebrew behind each
word, along with a simple definition.<b><br>
Commentary</b>: shows all installed commentary for that verse.<br>
<b>Witness</b> <b>Study</b>: shows all available ancient New
Testament manuscript witnesses which attest to the current
verse.<br>
<b>Variant</b> <b>Study</b>: shows all variant between the
manuscript witnesses for the current verse.<br>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
Other features include very basic bookmarks and search. The Android
release has an initial attempt at BibleSync support to send your
current verse out to all your friends running Bishop on the same
network (thanks Karl!).<br>
<br>
The initial goal of Bishop was to be the thinnest client on top of
the bindings, as an example and thus uses no 3rd party libraries,
save jQuery. Now that the initial release is completed and can
serve as an example, we're free to improve the mobile user interface
if anyone feels called to join the team and give it a shot.<br>
<br>
Installation locations follow. It's best to let Bishop install its
basic set of SWORD modules upon first run, so it has a minimal set
of tools it can use to operate. It will prompt you to do this when
you first launch the application and it finds no modules installed.<br>
<br>
Android users can install the app from:
<p><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.crosswire.bishop">https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.crosswire.bishop</a></p>
<p>iPhone users will need to send me their UDID for testing while we
try to get through the Apple Store approval process. I haven't
even tried yet as I don't have much hope that it is "pretty"
enough for them, but the download link for the iPhone binary is
here:</p>
<p><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://crosswire.org/bishop/manifest.plist">https://crosswire.org/bishop/manifest.plist</a></p>
<p><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://crosswire.org/bishop.ipa">https://crosswire.org/bishop.ipa</a></p>
<p>The code can be had from:</p>
<p><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://git.crosswire.org/main/bishop">http://git.crosswire.org/main/bishop</a></p>
<p>Please let us know what you think if you are a user, and offer
your suggestions from a usability perspective.</p>
<p>If you are a developer, please offer comments and suggest
features you have a desire and are willing to add.</p>
<p>Please give us a great rating so we show up in a search in the
Play Store and let others know. I think we have some unique
feature that other app don't offer and I've been using Bishop as
my morning reader for a while now. The default fullscreen text
without clutter is pleasant. <br>
</p>
<p>Christ's best for you!</p>
<p>Troy</p>
<p><br>
</p>
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