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

Nic Carter niccarter at mac.com
Sat Nov 14 17:24:36 MST 2009 

Ahh, yes, I spent way more time than I was happy with in getting the GUI for the install part to be "satisfactory"!
I was thinking I could create screenshots of everything, but I don't think that would give an accurate picture of how things like the installation of modules happens.  Easy solutions for me are for you to get a Mac (and run it on the iPhone simulator!) or, more realistically, do you have a friend with an iPhone or iPod Touch?  we could get PocketSword on that and you could play with it?
But the flow for installing a module is:  select the downloads tab -> select an install source (should I name these "Publishers"?) -> selection of a module type (Bible or commentary, atm) -> selection of the language (hence my posts recently about language codes) -> selection of the module name -> (presents lots of info about the module, with an "install" button available) hit the install button. It's a LONG flow, but I think it's important.  When the screen is so small, I wanna cut down the presented information on each screen, hence I make the user select what type of module & even what language they're interested in.  Should make it easier for a user to find a module in a specific language, that way  :)

Unfortunately I'm learning the SWORD framework as I go along, so I haven't had time to tap into much of the power that it has to offer.  Things like footnotes/x-ref (and you say "etc" but I have little idea what "etc" includes!) I have ideas about, but I've left them switched off via swManager->setGlobalOption()...  I figure it's better to not have them there than for there to be a half-baked implementation of them (have I been using Apple products for too long?  anyone remember the Copy&Paste saga on the iPhone?).

I don't have a hook to the upgrade/versioning info of installed modules yet, either, but I figure that's not a high priority atm, given module upgrades don't happen all that often?

Fonts are an issue on the iPhone.  Well, not entirely.  There's a good selection pre-installed on the iPhone & I now have code to allow the selection of the font to use & hopefully that fixes up any glyph issues we were having before.  I love the concept of having a selectable font per module, but I'm not there yet...  Looking into how to install a font on an iPhone (even just installing it for your own app) has shown me that there is a world of pain there.  But hopefully the situation is quite good with the fonts available in OS 3.x  :)  Of course, if you jailbreak your iPhone, it's easy to install additional fonts, but there's no way I'm going along that line  :P

Thanks for the post, Troy, you've given me further ideas.  :)  My todo list for 1.1 is now so big I'll probably have to cut it into 1.1 & 1.2 tags  :P

thanks, ybic
	nic...  :)


PS: for the Font gurus around, here is what I have made available in PocketSword:

and, yes, I am taking advantage of the role of "dictator" of PocketSword to make the executive decision to not allow "Marker Felt"  :P  everything else is up for discussion, not that  :P
and, yes, I have very little idea about some of these fonts.  I assume the various Heiti fonts are tweaked for different languages, for example, & I do know that if you use Zapfino, it pretty much makes reading the Bible impossible (it's too fancy!), but it's fun  :)

fontStrings = [[NSArray arrayWithObjects: 
			   @"American Typewriter", 
			   @"AppleGothic", 
			   @"Arial", 
			   @"Arial Hebrew", 
			   @"Arial Rounded MT Bold", 
			   @"Arial Unicode MS", 
			   @"Courier", 
			   @"Courier New", 
			   @"DB LCD Temp", 
			   @"Georgia", 
			   @"Geeza Pro", 
			   @"Heiti J", 
			   @"Heiti K", 
			   @"Heiti SC", 
			   @"Heiti TC", 
			   @"Helvetica",
			   @"Helvetica Neue", 
			   @"Hiragino Kaku Gothic ProN", 
			   //@"Marker Felt", 
			   @"Times New Roman", 
			   @"Thonburi", 
			   @"Trebuchet MS", 
			   @"Verdana", 
			   @"Zapfino", 
			   nil] retain];



On 14/11/2009, at 5:29 AM, Troy A. Griffitts wrote:

> 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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