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

[Michael Johnson]

Hello, Troy & all!

After a bit of testing, I have concluded that the Bishop app is awesome. :-)
Its current version works well on both iOS and Android.
I like its Scripture display layout. OK, there is some room for improvement in poetry display, making secondary and tertiary lines indented a little more like the NIV and World English Bible official printed editions do, but other than that, most things I think of now fall firmly in the camp of feature addition instead of bug fixes; like maybe more complete localization to other user interface languages.

The biggest flaw is not yet being in the Apple App Store for general use on iOS devices. Sure sending Troy a UDID and side loading a special compilation works for me for now, but it would get really tedious for Troy after more than just a few testers... and there are limits to how many testers you can have. I think it is at least as good as many iOS apps that are in Apple's App Store. I have an active Apple developer account, so I could submit it if you like, after I get back from the conference I am
enroute to, now.
 

On 03/01/2018 10:26 AM, Troy A. Griffitts wrote:
>
> 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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