[sword-devel] Wiki front end comparison - a intermediate summary

[Brian Fernandes]

Peter,

Truly a great effort and a good list of features for frontend authors to 
refer to and improve.

I want to edit the FireBible rows a bit, but would like to make a few 
clarifications first; I will wait for your response before editing the 
tables or you can go ahead and edit it yourself. Since you left several 
columns blank for FireBible, I thought you may have sent me an email 
with some questions but I haven't received anything - so here is some 
info anyway.

1) Daily Devotionals
FB does support daily devotionals, so I've added a "yes" here. What does 
Automatic mean though? Automatically brings up the devotional when you 
start he application? Something I have been considering for awhile.

2) Indexing (currently marked "no")
When you search a Bible using the toolbar, it is automatically indexed 
if an index does not already exist (using JSword/Lucene) is this the 
indexing you are talking about?

3) Archiving / New Content Immediately Avaialble
Can you explain what you mean by these two?

4) Image support
FireBible (since 0.8.5) does support Image Gen books and Map/Image 
modules. It supports all image formats that Firefox can display, but you 
cannot yet resize images.

5) Several texts open at the same time?
You can have multiple Firefox windows or multiple tabs open 
simultaneously with sword content. Inbuilt side by side support does not 
exist however, unless you install one of the Firefox split window 
extensions. This is one of my todos.

6) Bookmarks
Anything you open in FireBible is bookmarkable and can be tagged. You 
would bookmark and / or tag the "bible:// or sword://" URI being 
displayed just like you would any other "http://" URL. You can then back 
them up, restore them, share them or export them. Maybe you can even 
share them on delicious.com (not sure if they will accept other protocols).

I assume these can be considered Nestable too because you are free to 
make multi level bookmark folders into which you place these URIs.

Besides this, most content which appears in the central display area 
(and not in the last container in the sidebar) also goes into your 
Firefox history, just like any other site you visited.

You can also just type in the title of some content you have bookmarked 
or recently visited in the "awesome bar" to bring it up. e.g. I could 
type in "Genesis 20" in the address bar and Firefox would probably show 
you "bible://gen.20.1-ff" as an auto complete option, if I had 
bookmarked that URL or had been there recently.

I consider the above bookmarking behavior a significant plus point, 
which I gained mostly for free once I decided to make FireBible URI based.

Thanks again for the great effort,
Brian.

Peter von Kaehne wrote:
> I have worked now several hours on the wiki comparison page.
> 
> What I tried to achieve is reduction of as many as possible entries into
> simple yes/no entries (+/- short comment) to make it as easy as possible
> to actually compare.
> 
> This meant obviously that the number of list columns has gone  up
> drastically to allow for all features, including the subfeatures of
> features.
> 
> In particular I have tried to dissolve the unclassified "other" category
> as much as possible.
> 
> I have therefore grouped the features into categories. These are
> hopefully self explanatory and widely acceptable.
> 
> I have taken no account of smoothness of operations, ease of finding of
> features, general beauty etc.
> 
> What becomes obvious is
> 
> a) BibleCS remains in the very top of our applications - only Xiphos and
>  presumably (because I have not tested it) BT have the same wealth of
> features and some more. All others are far behind in at least one major
> category, often in several.
> 
> b) The most glaring lack of too many applications in my opinion is
> incomplete module support. Please do not take deficiences in this area
> as feature request but as a (show stopping?) bug.
> 
> c) A lot of the features presented as new in newer applications have
> been present similar but under a different name in older.
> 
> d) Bookmarks/tags/lists - all these appear essentially similar as a
> concept, but with some drastic differences in terms of access, usability
> and sub features. No application has a complete superset of all others
> in terms of subfeatures in this field. As a concept, bookmarks appear to
> me a version of lexicon (or possibly a structured GenBook)_- at least
> this is how many frontends have gone (some like BibleSword even bring a
> lexicon like preloaded bookmark list)- but none actually have gone the
> whole hog and have created a user editable LexDict module with their
> book marks. Take this as a hint :-)
> 
> I am very sure that I am biased. I have shot some emails to some of you
> if I could not find some features. Correct me if I got things wrong.
> 
> Peter
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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