[mobile-devel] Thoughts regarding future And Bible enhancements

[Kenneth Arnold]

On Sat, Jan 29, 2011 at 5:22 PM, Martin Denham <mjdenham at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have started thinking about the next enhancements to And Bible and would
> like to give people a chance to comment.  The items in the first list I have
> been thinking about and am probably ready to implement.  Please comment if
> you have any thoughts or opinions regarding implementation or regarding
> items you would like to see or not see in And Bible.  Items in the second
> list I would like to implement but am not yet ready.  Items in the last list
> I have no plans yet to implement.  People seem to like the recently added
> grid navigation and that was pushed through because of comments from this
> group:

Thanks for not only doing the grunt work but also being transparent
about the development process and priorities. Is that "Later Release"
list things you'd like help with?

> Alternative 3: Add stateful Speak button beside Quick Link buttons (at top)
> in Portrait mode (more room) if selected in Settings.  The Speak/Silent
> button would switch between the several states Speak, 2 Chapters, 4
> Chapters, Book, Silent.

I don't use speech but this seems simple in both concept and
implementation. It could be just a selection of what to do at the end
of this chapter: stop or go on?

> Bad XML Toleration
> The optimised page loading does not have JSword's bad xml structure
> toleration for books like WEB.  I plan to try falling back on JSword if the
> optimised technique fails.

For fast enough devices it might be reasonable to always use JSword.

> Strong's List of Ref use
> Use Lucene index to display a list of all  verses containing a certain
> Strong's ref

e-Sword treats that as just another kind of search.

> Remove Create Index Button

There is one? It's just what happens when you push Search, right?

> Navigation
> I don't like putting my fingers all over the screen I am reading but
> thumbwheels are not so common now so maybe: touch right/left edge to go
> forward back a chapter, touch bottom corner to scroll down.

All the ebook readers I use now let you use the volume keys to scroll
by pages. I find it quite comfortable. (I suppose a separate question
is whether And Bible should be more like an ebook reader that happens
to work well for Bibles. In practice that mostly means switching to
page-like navigation, but could also mean bookmarks, notes, etc.)

> Reading Plan
> I did not know how many people use a reading plan until recently.

The community is now getting pretty big, with 5-digit download
figures. It's approaching time to start figuring out how to scale the
user community interaction. Maybe something lightweight like a comment
page (Disqus for example)?

> Faster Start Up

Do you know what's slow yet? That could be a lightweight way for new
developers to get started.

> EverNote integration

I'm not sure, but you might just be able to use an Intent to send a
chunk of text to any app that can deal with it.

Cool!
-Ken