[sword-devel] Bishop 1.4.0 and SWORD Utility Modules

[Troy A. Griffitts]

Dear all,

I'm wrapping up the next release of Bishop and would like to possibly
change the default reading font.

Does anyone have a special place in their heart for a favorite font they
would recommend?  It should be freely usable, have a good coverage of
Unicode and preferably already converted to a web font.

For other frontend developers, this next release of Bishop uses a new
feature of the upcoming SWORD release called "Utility" modules.  These
are modules which frontends can download, update, and remove with
InstallMgr, like any other module, but they are not intended to be shown
to end users.  They contain utility data for implementing frontend
features.  The specific utility modules used by this new release of
Bishop are the two Eusebian Canon modules which provide data for
creating parallel Gospel displays.  SWORD will eventually hide these
modules from the normal modules list, so they won't show in existing
frontends when installed, but for now trunk still shows them under a
category "Utility".

To see what you can do with this Eusebian utility module set, a
pre-release of Bishop can be installed from here:

http://crosswire.org/~scribe/bishop-1.3.901.apk
bishop-1.3.901.apk size: 8858668 md5: 8eaf67ad5eb7d205178638dcbef418b7

You'll need to turn on the "Show Parallel Gospels" setting.

Or you can have a look at SWORDWeb here:

http://www2.crosswire.org/study/passagestudy.jsp?key=Matt.3

You'll notice the Eusebian numbers in the left margin.  Click on one to
see the Gospel parallels for that passage using the currently selected
Bible.

You'll also see a slider at the top of the parallel Gospels page which
allows adjusting context before and after.

The Utility Modules concept brings a solution to the common problem
we've had when we'd like to include a dataset with SWORD for
implementing features in a frontend, but not have the module displayed
to the end user.  We've never had a standard way to include these,
update these, etc.  We've hacked a few datasets into the engine (e.g.,
the "locales" locale for looking up internationalized locale names), but
none of these are good implementations nor were standardized ways to
include or update these datasets.  I am hoping this Eusebian module set
will be just the first of many "Utility" modules we make available in
the coming months and years.  We should start a wiki page where
developers can learn about Utility modules which are available.  I'll be
sure to include a "how to use" primer in the "About" section of these
first two.

Hope everyone is staying healthy.  God's blessings,

Troy