[sword-devel] frontend features, their applicability -- consistency?

[Peter von Kaehne]

Karl Kleinpaste wrote:

>
> Nobody real cares.  Real, in the sense of being a general user of our
> software, as opposed to us, who are stuck on features for features'
> sake.

I think you are probably right there. Unless we move a whole way further
and allow a explicitly partial import and export - at which time you can
design teaching sessions for a church bible class etc. But to be honest
- and I refer to some other ancient thread here - the conceptual
difference between bookmarks and GenBooks is minimal if you think it
really through (topically organised, free text and references, plenty of
them). If GenBooks were as easily created as a book mark collection,
annotated and easily reorganised, then you would not need book marks as
a separate implementation.

>> I would think that this is the main place where syncing has a role to
>> play. And the order of the day is clearly for mobile application
>> developers to become equally featureful as desktop frontends.
> 
> Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.
> 
> There is _physically_ no way for, say, PocketSword to achieve feature
> parity with Xiphos (or BT or BPBible or...), simply because an iPhone
> hasn't got the screen real estate to do what Xiphos does.  It's an
> impossibility, due to the physical characteristics of the device.

Not so sure - Pocketsword is going to move to the ipad. Chris has
already used the current pocketsword on an ipad and seemed to like it -
see his facebook entry.

>> We had some time ago a debate of what we would consider a "fully
>> featured frontend" - and large part of this was what was considered
>> necessary functionality.
> 
> http://crosswire.org/wiki/Frontends:FeatureList
> 
> By its own admission, the page is idealist, so I'm not convinced that
> the suggestions there represent a true baseline capability, but rather
> lists all the bells and whistles one could ask for.

No, that was the "idealist" page. The "realist" bit is distributed
across various threads when we redesigned the application page in the
website. Whether BpBible (at the time) was to be accepted among the
"fully featured" list etc, whether BibleCS should be abandoned, what a
flagship application was etc etc. - caused a lot of waves and upset all
round, but resulted also in some clarification and ultimately in the
feature comparison page. "Fully featured" as a compromise meant here a
more minimalist fully featuredness - like all modules in main repor and
all module features and a (little) bit more.

Peter