[sword-devel] Bishop 1.8.0pre5 with SWORD 1.10.0pre1

[Troy A. Griffitts]

Dear all,

While testing and fixing SWORD 1.10.0pre1 I used Bishop (Android) as my 
client.  As a result we have a new Bishop prelease available built 
against the latest SWORD and with a few new features.

A few of us have been trying to fill the hole PocketSword left us 
(thanks Tobias <contact at tklein.info>, Martin <mjdenham at gmail.com>, 
Maxwell <maxmmur at gmail.com>, and any others I've missed).  And in this 
spirit I had a look at what PocketSword did well and Bishop sucked at 
and tried to improve a few things, including:

  - Bookmark support, which lets you read/write bookmarks to a shared 
folder like Google Drive.
  - Verse colors set on your bookmarks or bookmark folders to highlight 
text in reading mode
  - Notes on bookmarks which get shown in the notes tab at the bottom 
when turned on.

And I've tried to make it prettier, because, well, Bishop and most of my 
GUIs have historically not been beautiful.

I also do think I have a solution for sharing SWORD libraries between 
apps on various versions of Android.
You should be able to select something like /sdcard/Documents/sword/ now 
for SWORD library storage and theoretically have that location also be 
selected from another Android app where they can share the location.

Also more manuscript research features, in step with the INTF work we do.

Some of you are already on the beta list, but if not, the only way I 
found to let people register themselves without my involvement is to add 
a 'google group' to the beta availability and let you join the google 
group.

If you're not on the beta and would like to join, it's a quick three 
steps with the same Google account you use on your phone:

1. Join the tester group: 
https://groups.google.com/g/crosswire-google-beta (wait a few minutes 
for it to propagate across Google services).
2. Join the beta: https://play.google.com/apps/testing/org.crosswire.bishop
3. Update Bishop from the Play Store (or install it, if you are new). 
Later betas arrive as normal updates.

Theming has been redone, so if you had Bishop already installed and had 
selected app and/or reading fonts and sizes along with an old theme, 
your choices will be reset to the defaults.  Sorry about that.

We could really use translator updates for the UI.  I had fable give 
best guesses and have kept them all below a ======== PLEASE REVIEW THE 
MACHINE TRANSLATIONS BELOW THIS LINE ========== line.

What would help:

   - Play with the module manager under "Library", especially over 
HTTP(S) sources.
   - Try the new Manuscripts panel and the Coverage tab and tell me what 
makes sense and what does not.
   - Anything that looks wrong at the top or bottom edge of the screen, 
in landscape, or on a phone with a display cutout.
   - If your language is among the 18 or so uilocales.d/ files we ship, 
look at the Settings and the Manuscripts screens and send corrections or 
patches.  The files live here:
https://git.crosswire.org/main/bishop/-/tree/master/www/bundledResources/uilocales.d
   - Let me know what you think of the Bookmarks, notes, and verse 
highlight colors features.  We all miss Nic and look forward to seeing 
him again face to Face with our Savior.

Please send your feedback here and not to the google group-- that was 
only a mechanism for self-subscription to the beta.

Hope everyone is well,

Troy