Change History

The following is the broad outline of the version of JSword, BibleDesktop and Project-B (the old name for JSword).

• Version 1.6 - BLAZING TONGUES (SIXTH) UPDATE -
  This is the 6^th major release since 1.0, so we are changing the numbering scheme. The most obvious changes are that it is faster (BLAZING) and it is fully translated into several languages (TONGUES). This release has had the most contributors. Many thanks to all of them. If we've missed you, send us a note and we'll give you credit.
  • New icons for Bible Desktop (Thanks to Casper)
  • Completed translations:
    • Chinese, Traditional and Simplified (Thanks Chang)
    • Farsi (Thanks Peter)
    • German (Thanks Benny)
    • Vietnamese (Thanks Daniel)
  • BibleDesktop now remembers its location and size on restart. (Thanks to Adam)
  • BibleDesktop now starts with Genesis 1, rather than blank. (Thanks Keith)
  • Improved how Strong's numbers are shown. (Thanks Yingjie)
  • It is now possible to install over top of a module, when it is newer.
  • Created several new command line programs
    • BibleScope - Compares a Bible or Commentary to the KJV versification.
    • BookExporter - Exports a book to SWORD's imp format.
    • BookIndexer - Manages indexes on books.
    • BookInstaller - Manages the installation of books.
    • BookLookup - Performs key based lookups on books.
  • Added support for LZSS compression.
  • Enabled stemmed searching. (Thanks to Sijo)
  • Enhanced performance, especially in indexing and in displaying dictionaries.
  • Added support for new modules encoded in TEI.
  • Created an example of how to use JSword in a webapp.
  • Large toolbar icons are now the default.
  As always, there are many bug fixes and minor improvements.
• Version 1.5 (was 1.0.7) - POLYGLOT (FIFTH) UPDATE -
  • Fully updated User's Manual covering all the features.
  • Bible Desktop now allows viewing Bibles in Parallel. Unlike all other Bible programs, you can have as many as you like.
  • Now you can do a side-by-side comparison of different versions of the Bible.
  • Added a Quick Pick for Bible book and chapter.
  • Deep search features: You can now search Strong's Numbers, Notes, Headings, and Cross References, with a simple rebuild of the index.
  • More translation work into German and Farsi.
  • Dates for the Daily Devotional are now internationalized.
  • Better Mac experience:
    • Preferences, About and Quit are on the Bible Desktop menu.
    • The nightly build is now available as a Mac application.
  • More bug fixes:
    • Selecting a passage in the Select Passage dialog box will now automatically search when it is closed.
    • After indexing a Bible, the Search box shows up automatically
    • After changing the font of the Bible View, it takes affect immediately.
    • Performance is better overall.
  • More preference changes:
    • Change Bible Desktop's font. Great for high resolution monitors and for viewing Bible Desktop in Farsi.
    • Change the language of Bible Desktop. See what it would look like in German or Farsi.
    • Tool tips now provide quick help for each option. See the manual for more details.
  • Hidden and undocumented preferences are available for those who want to hack Bible Desktop
• Version 1.4 (was 1.0.6) - GENERAL (FOURTH) UPDATE -
  • Sword "General Book" modules are now supported. In doing this we fixed some bugs and improved the appearance of some modules.
  • We've also added the ability to supply your own reading plans in addition to what BibleDesktop provides.
  • On top of all that you now have an option to list Commentaries in the drop down list of Bibles. This allows you to search them and look up by verse.
  • Building indexes is now much, much faster and searches are a bit faster.
  • We have improved the look on the Mac and on Linux a bit more.
  • BibleDesktop is now partially translated into German and Farsi.
  • Added Bible book names in Chinese.
  • Inital work on getting BibleDesktop to run from a CD or USB drive.
• Version 1.3 (was 1.0.5) - BABEL (THIRD) UPDATE - Many small, but significant changes.
  • Bible book names in over 30 languages are now supported with English as the default.

    Afrikaans	Farsi	Korean	Russian
    Arabic (Egyptian)	Finnish	Latin	Slovak
    Bulgarian	French	Lithuanian	Slovenian
    Czech	German	Norwegian	Spanish
    Danish	Hebrew	Polish	Swedish
    Dutch	Hungarian	Portuguese	Thai
    English	Indonesian	Portuguese (Brazil)	Ukranian
    Estonian	Italian	Romanian

  • Support for images.
  • Improved the appearance of the NET Bible.
  • Improved the support of ThML.
  • Improved the handling of passages as they are found as references in modules.
  • Fixed a bug preventing locked dictionaries from showing correctly
  • Fixed potential bugs pointed out by the QA tools FindBugs and PMD
  • Fixed miscellaneous bugs found by a scan of all the modules.
• Version 1.2 (was 1.0.4) - SECOND UPDATE - Webster's Dictionary is now supported. BibleDesktop is now a native Mac OS X application! with a Mac standard disk image. The default location of Sword Modules is no longer ~/.jsword on the Mac or on Windows. It is now ~/Library/Application Support/Sword on the Mac and ~/Application Data/Sword on Windows. Likewise, the preferences that were stored in ~/.jsword have been moved to ~/Library/Application Support/JSword for Mac and ~/Application Data/JSword for Windows.
• Version 1.1 (was 1.0.3) - FIRST UPDATE - Most of the changes are to make the viewing of Bibles better and to support new Bibles that will be available soon, notably an update to the KJV, the first release of ESV (thanks Crossway!), the NET Bible (thanks Bible.org) and the NASB (thanks Lockman).
  This release also adds support for locked books. Once a locked book is installed you can go to the "Installed Books" tab on the installer, click unlock and enter the unlock key.
• Version 1.0.2 - SECOND BUG FIX - Our apologies to our Mac users, since only the most recent version of the Mac OS has Java 5.0. This release no longer requires Java 5.0, but rather 1.4 or higher. This release also changes the internal JSword API, merging VerseBase into Key and using an iterator rather than an array as a collection of verses.
• Version 1.0.1 - FIRST BUG FIX - This release provides a few bug fixes and requires Java 5.0.
• Version 1.0 - FIRST FULL RELEASE - Since the last release we have been working on small bugs and features to make BibleDesktop more useable.
  • We now provide a Windows installer that does not require you to download Java first.
  • Java WebStart now works for Fedora Core Linux.
  • You can now use BibleDesktop's book installer with a proxy.
  • The installer now lists Daily Devotional and Glossaries separately from Dictionaries. With this now each book (or module, if you prefer) has its own colorful icon and BibleDesktop now classifies books the same as Sword.
  • Daily Devotions are now fully supported.
    
    • The list of days now show the day and the month's name.
    • Any installed Daily Devotional can be selected to show the day's readings.
    • When selecting a Daily Devotional it will show the day's readings.
  • Viewing of Bible passages has been greatly improved.
    • Tabs can now be reused. This is determined by an option. When set, clicking on a verse reference will open the reference in the current tab.
    • The default viewing options create a less cluttered view.
    • Notes now have meaningful text markers.
    • Words marked with two Stongs number now show all (rather than just the first).
    • Word morphology is now supported for books that have it.
  • Search has been significantly improved.
    • Search now shows the number of verses found.
    • Search results can be prioritized.
    • Book names like Song of Solomon and Revelation of John are now acceptable for search input.
    • History is maintained. You can go forward or back in the list of passages you have visited. It is not perfected yet.
  • More useful About dialog.
• Version 0.99 - THE FOURTH BETA - Almost ready for a 1.0 release and nearly free from bugs. This release represents the largest set of changes to date. Many, many new features. Usability and performance is greatly improved.
  • Bug fixes, of course. Otherwise, it would not be beta.
  • Lots of usability improvements. We answered nearly all user requests for enhancements.
  • Improved performance across the board.
  • Users can now control how passages are displayed.
  • The installer organizes books first by type and then by language.
  • The installer automatically gets the list of books from crosswire.org.
  • Improved the display of the Book descriptions in the installer.
  • Full support for NASB, when it is released.
  • Further reduced size of the executable. (Down from a high of 8.6M to 1.7M!)
  • The user now controls when and if indexes are built.
  • Used Lucene, an open source project, for indexing.
  • Downloads of Books and Indexes can be canceled.
  • Books and indexes can now be removed from the program.
• Version 0.98 - THE THIRD BETA - Splitting Bible Desktop from the JSword Core, and creating projects like jsword-web, common and bibledesktop-web in support. Removal of JAXB for JDOM and lots of work trimming things down to size and simplifying.
• Version 0.97 - THE SECOND BETA - make the API use Book more than the other interfaces, new module installer and lots of bug fixing.
• Version 0.96 - THE FIRST BETA - Work on JNLP, an new website and lots more work on Sword drivers, OSIS, JAXB.
• Version 0.95 - THE NAMELESS - Major work to flesh out Dictionary and Concordance along with a much fuller implentation of the Sword drivers.
• Version 0.90 - JSWORD - Merging with JSword
• Version 0.80 - SWORD1 - Troy just did a call for Java Bible programs from which to make jsword. There have been many updates - Logging API updates, a new GUI framework and work on the WordNet thesaurus.
• Version 0.75 - THE MAP - New Mapper application, lots of tuning, tweaks and fixes.
• Version 0.73 - THE MUTE - Lots of tweaks to speed things up, history bug fixed, new PassageTally functionality, SerBible is now the preferred format.
• Version 0.72 - THE SHOUT 2 - New lib project, many fixes to servlets and Project.java, Source syntax colouring, Office interface revamp.
• Version 0.71 - THE UNANNOUNCED - 2nd major upload, minor bug fixes on version 0.7
• Version 0.7 - THE ANNOUNCED - Lots of testing, tidying up, and organizing. The Book package has been majorly re-worked, and many of the packages have been sorted out.
• Version 0.6 - THE SERVANT - New servlet interface. Lots of work on the config i/f lots of tidying up. New web pages, & mail list.
• Version 0.5 - THE CABBAGE - Lots of changes - RawBible, Search.bestMatch(), SelfTestBase, Some I18N, Config. Some GUI work.
• Version 0.46 - THE FOREIGN APPLET - Quick release as v0.45 with I18N for the Germans.
• Version 0.45 - THE APPLET - Quick release to get together an applet for demo to Sword people.
• Version 0.4 - THE MIX - Merged passage and dictionary. The dictionary package was shrinking, and being simplified, and the classes Passage and Strongs considered core. TallyBoard renamed PassageTally and made to implement Passage. Outstanding work - Events and Editable book names/I18N.
• Version 0.3 - THE SHOUT - The search system wanted TallyBoard, and I revised Passage being a Collection at the same time. The only remaining functionality requests are Sorting out Events, and I18N. Some work on Version. Search - I'm beginning to like this design. I just added ( ) in a few hours without any major changes to the engine at all. I need to tighten up the docs and sort out GrammarParamWord.
• Version 0.2 - THE PLATFORM - Passage - I need to spend some time on the other bits of the system. The TODO list for this is getting more and more streched. What is here is good though. Search - Been through about 100 different search Engine designs, and I'm still not happy. However a working engine is better than none at all.
• Version 0.1 - THE TODDLER - Proof of concept. Quickly hacked-up GUI. Passage - About 80% of the stuff I plan for this library is complete. There are bugs. The most notable of which is that Jude 2 does not exist - you must use Jude 1:2, and so on. Included is full JavaDoc and a fairly exhaustive SelfTest module. Search - very hacked up and needs re-writing.