[sword-devel] Apple Plans To Boot Orphaned Apps From its App Store

[David Haslam]

And here's my reply:

Hi Tim,

Thanks for contacting me. 

Please understand that in terms of skills and acquired knowledge, I'm not an
iOS app developer, nor do I have a Mac platform. cf. I imagine it would be
much harder to develop and test iOS apps from a Windows PC.

It's great that you've got involved. We know why Nic is busy. I think
Mannfred Bergman is also pretty tied up in terms of spare time since he
became a father. 

After iOS 9 was released was the time when issues began to arise with
installing search index. It's only got worse with subsequent versions. Also
from what Nic has written before, maintaining backwards compatibility is
desirable, as one cannot assume that every PS user keeps his device up to
date. Sometimes that's an impossible goal to implement though.

cf. The same goes for modules in a different way. One cannot assume that
every user has the most recent version of an installed module. This is why
Nic also maintained a separate search index for older module releases.

Also since we gained access to the huge Bible modules repository at
eBible.org, none of these yet have an installable index, AFAIK. NB. Updates
to such modules can occur quite often, as Michael improves things with
Haiola.

Nic had hoped to move away from downloading and installing the search index
for each module, and implement the creation of the search index using the
device itself. This was beyond the capability of the earliest iOS devices in
terms of speed and efficiency. That no longer is the case. cf. AndBible has
always done the index creation within the Android device. All the more
recent types of iPhone and iPad should be able to do this speedily if
someone can write the code.

btw. Another unpublicised issue is why installing a module in Maintainer
Mode along with its Lucene search index as created using Xiphos, and
included within the same Zip archive usually leaves the index as not found
by PS. According to Nic, an index made using Xiphos should be compatible
with PS. I've only seen the compatibility demonstrated for two private Bible
modules that I made for my own personal use, one of which was the English
Revised Version of 1885.

I have TestFlight installed in my iPad Mini. It's a long time since I last
used it to try out prerelease of PS for Nic.

Final thought.  When he was active in PS development, Nic used Twitter as
the main support communications channel. I'm not a tweeter.

Best regards,

David Haslam



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