[sword-devel] Bishop for Android and iOS / JavaScript bindings

[Troy A. Griffitts]

Dear team,

You all know we've been working on Cordova bindings for SWORD for quite
some time now.  We now have a simple reader written in JavaScript which
will run unchanged on both Android and iOS.Bishop includes an InstallMgr
to auto-discover remote installation sources and let a user install
SWORD content.

I've kept the development code name "Bishop", my favorite android (from
Aliens) and almost appropriate for a Bible app :)  I've also tacked on
our boring moniker from our Windows app, "Bishop: The SWORD Project for
Android".  Long name but should get more search hits.

Basically, Bishop's UI has 2 basic modes:

    *Reader*: which simply shows 1 chapter of up to 3 Bibles in parallel.
    *Verse* *Study*: When in reader mode, as the user scrolls, one verse
    will always be active, when "Verse Study" is chosen from the menu,
    the user can then drill down into that active verse.  Verse Study
    has 4 tools:*
    *

        *Word* *Study*: shows the verse broken down word by word,
        showing the original Greek or Hebrew behind each word, along
        with a simple definition.*
        Commentary*: shows all installed commentary for that verse.
        *Witness* *Study*: shows all available ancient New Testament
        manuscript witnesses which attest to the current verse.
        *Variant* *Study*: shows all variant between the manuscript
        witnesses for the current verse.

Other features include very basic bookmarks and search.  The Android
release has an initial attempt at BibleSync support to send your current
verse out to all your friends running Bishop on the same network (thanks
Karl!).

The initial goal of Bishop was to be the thinnest client on top of the
bindings, as an example and thus uses no 3rd party libraries, save
jQuery.  Now that the initial release is completed and can serve as an
example, we're free to improve the mobile user interface if anyone feels
called to join the team and give it a shot.

Installation locations follow.  It's best to let Bishop install its
basic set of SWORD modules upon first run, so it has a minimal set of
tools it can use to operate.  It will prompt you to do this when you
first launch the application and it finds no modules installed.

Android users can install the app from:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.crosswire.bishop

iPhone users will need to send me their UDID for testing while we try to
get through the Apple Store approval process.  I haven't even tried yet
as I don't have much hope that it is "pretty" enough for them, but the
download link for the iPhone binary is here:

https://crosswire.org/bishop/manifest.plist

https://crosswire.org/bishop.ipa

The code can be had from:

http://git.crosswire.org/main/bishop

Please let us know what you think if you are a user, and offer your
suggestions from a usability perspective.

If you are a developer, please offer comments and suggest features you
have a desire and are willing to add.

Please give us a great rating so we show up in a search in the Play
Store and let others know.  I think we have some unique feature that
other app don't offer and I've been using Bishop as my morning reader
for a while now.  The default fullscreen text without clutter is pleasant.

Christ's best for you!

Troy


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