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

[DM Smith]

Peter, (and others)
A couple of thoughts regarding this wiki.

First, I think it is going very well. Kudos to all that have helped. I  
can see a lot of effort has gone into this!

I think it would be good to have an explanation of the column headings  
under each table. Many of the headings are clear to us as developers,  
some are not. (As shown by Brian's questions) Since the headings are  
terse by nature, having an explanation for all would be good. I think  
a simple list with the heading repeated in bold would be good.

Also, should every table repeat the OS listing? I think having it once  
in the first table with a link on the page to CrossWire's home would  
be sufficient.

In Him,
	DM


On Mar 1, 2009, at 6:39 AM, Brian Fernandes wrote:

> 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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