[sword-devel] Palm Bible Converter

[Stephen Denne]

Hello,
(I've bcc'ed a number of people I thought may be interested and might not be
on this list.)

Nic Carter wrote in sword-devel@crosswire.org:
> doing stuff like Stephen Denne is doing with Datacute...

I guess I should tell a few more people about my grand plan for
bible-related software on the Palm... to see what level of interest there
is.

I've created a concordance program, which uses other's bible programs to
view the text. This involves launching other bible readers, viewing a
specific verse. Most bible reader programs store their "current verse" in
some format (in preferences, or a database), and some of them provide a
documented API on how to launch their software to view a specific verse.
What I wanted was to encapsulate all that info & functionality in a
distributable "library", so that I & others could add more supported bible
reader programs, or use the same functions to create other tools. As an
example of other tools, I'm creating a few verse selector applications, for
the dual purpose of demonstrating the functionality, and to try out some
user interface ideas (one I thought would be fantastic turns out to be
extremely hard to use - I might distribute that too, it does work, and if it
did lead more of an appreciation of just how hard GUI are to design.)

I'm toying with calling this project the Datacute Bible Gateway, even though
it is more of a switch. I suspect non-techie users will think a switch as
something that turns light bulbs on and off, and think of a gateway is
something you go through. Maybe call it an open gateway? It's got nothing to
do with gospelcom.net... why are good names for things so hard to find?

The other parts to the Datacute Open Bible Shunting Yards will be
versification schemes (I'm not an expert on the variations, I'm more wanting
to be able to handle the variations): Lots of bible software will want to
have a short code (small number of bits) for a reference, and be able to
translate that code into a full reference, or an abbreviated reference. The
code to do this also needs to know how many books, chapters per book, verses
per chapter there are. This kind of info doesn't need to be repeated for
each bible-related application when space is precious. Users of different
languages can replace the pdb for a particular versification scheme with one
they are use to.
The gateway will probably be a panel (appears in Prefs) where you can chose
your preferred bible reading program, your preferred bible text supplying
program, your preferred bible searching program, your preferred bookmarking
program, your preferred reading plan program, your default versification
scheme to use if one isn't specified in the API calls, etc etc.
I realise there are a lot more problems related to versification schemes,
but I figure I can start with my concordance indexes being for a particular
versification scheme each, and the verse selectors running with whichever
the user chooses.

I also would like the gateway to speak some of the APIs I know of, (e.g.
Laridian Software's). Not just when talking to MyBible, but if combined with
knowing how to set other bible software's current verse, this will enable
products that currently make use of MyBible to also make limited use of the
other bible programs that don't yet, or may never support Laridian's API.

The specifics of how to use the gateway will be documented, and available
for free, so that lots of developers can write bible-related Palm software,
re-using existing functionality. For example, someone might write a Desk
Accessory that asks the gateway to launch the user's favourite verse
selector to choose a verse, then asks the gateway to retrieve the text for
that verse from the user's favourite bible text supplying program, then
shows it to the user for confirmation, then pastes the reference and text
into the active field.

I want the gateway to be open source, but not till I've got a bit more of it
coded, and talked to a few more people. eg. I recently read on
palminfocenter that David Fedor, the Director of Developer Architecture and
Disclosure and one of the most senior programmers at PalmSource Inc., also
wrote Laridian's MyBible ... he might have some great ideas on how to
structure & talk to this gateway. If anyone has his email, are you able to
send it to me privately?

How is this related to The Sword Project? I'm not too sure... this plan
sounds like it would intersect with some of the functions that a sword lib
for PalmOS would provide.

Stephen Denne.
--
Datacute - Acute Information Revelation Tools
http://www.datacute.co.nz/