Bible for Android

Bookmark label colors, sharing fixes, chapter navigation, Romanian and Japanese (2.2)

2012-01-11T16:15:00.001+08:00

Now you can assign colors to your bookmark labels. It's now even easier to organize your bookmarks!

Change the colors by long-pressing on a label on the bookmarks screen.

When you see the list of bookmarks, the labels will be colored, too!

There was long-standing issue on sharing of verses. Normally, sharing text works on any sharing destinations that declare themselves to receive data of text/plain type. However, for some unknown reason, Facebook declines sharing of plain text. Facebook only receives plain text that forms a URL. Unfortunately, there is no way for an Android app to know which sharing destination the user selects if (using Intent.createChooser()). This has prevented us to share to Facebook correctly.

The only way feasible for now is to create our own sharing screen. Starting from this release, Bible for Android will use its own sharing screen, which IMHO better than the default sharing screen. It loads the list and the app icons in the background, so it doesn't lag like the default sharing screen :D

Moreover, and most importantly, we know when the user selects Facebook as the destination. We can treat it specially and give a URL instead of verse text.

We also added an option to use volume buttons to navigate between chapters. This was suggested by +Rony Gabriel, thanks! An excellent suggestion.

Last but not least, now there is two different Bible versions available as optional download: Romanian (Corneliscu's translation) and Japanese (口語訳 – colloquial translation). +Liviu Foltut helped in providing the Romanian Bible translation and also translating the app into Romanian.

As you can see, the Japanese version has identation (for quotations and poems) and paragraph break. This is processed from the perfect XML files provided by bible.salterrae.net.

Support for Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0) in 2.2

2012-01-11T15:52:00.001+08:00

With the advent of Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0), Google has put a single OS for both phones and tablets. All the enhancements of Honeycomb are now available on phones, which mostly good, but it means that we need to update our applications to correctly support the new UI.

Most relevant to us are:

Action bar is now available on phones, our icons are no longer suitable to put there, it's too big and has Android 2.2 style.
The width of action bar is limited on phones, we can't cramp so many buttons into it. Some of them needs to be put in the overflow menu.
And most importantly, some ICS users experienced flicker when opening preferences and going back to the main screen. It is to the extent that the app is unusable. After some investigation, it was due to setting locale forcefully interferes with setting of the locale from the OS, unlike in previous releases.

The new icons are used for Android 2.3 and above. Android 2.2 and lower will get the old icons.

Thanks to +Alta Falconeri for the help of reporting and testing this issue.

Italicized text for translator's note in King James version (2.1.0)

2011-11-28T18:30:00.000+08:00

King James version of the Bible is known to have indicators on the words that are translator's note. Those are not really present in the original languages of the Bible (which is Hebrew, (Aramaic,) and Greek).

One example is:

Gen 1:9-11 And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good. And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.

With those italicized words, the sentences become correct English, and at the same time, it aids us in studying the Bible, because we know which words are not actually God's Word literally, but to a certain extent, an explanation or interpretation of the translators.

Starting from version 2.1.0, Bible for Android uses KJV that includes italic formatting for those words, along with red-lettering for Jesus' (when He was a man) words.

If you are using Alkitab (Indonesian version), delete the kjv.yes file from sdcard/bible/yes and use the app to download the new version of the kjv data.

2.0.6: Search text color and other fixes for tablets

2011-11-28T15:10:00.000+08:00

Alkitab 2.0.6 has just been released.

On tablets, search terms are now visible. Before this, the text color is not defined, so on Android < 3.0 it will show as black, on >= 3.0 as white. But the background is white, so it's not visible on Android >= 3.0 before.

The home button is now functional, it takes you back to the Bible text.

Recent verses list is now limited to 20 entries, before it was 10 entries.

Version 2.0.0 released!

2011-10-02T01:11:00.000+08:00

A major update to the Bible application has been released (soon the English version)!

A common problem that was encountered when a new user uses the application, is that they accidentally open the verse menu (context menu containing Add bookmark, Write notes, Highlight etc.) because they lay down their finger too long on the verses.

Finally I stopped using this method in order to open the verse menu. Instead, tap (just a normal tap, not long-press) a verse or several verses then there will be a button that fades in (I hope the animation makes users notice there is a button showing) on the bottom-right corner. Press that button to open the verse menu. See the following screen:

A bit more troublesome, but I hope that is compensated by the fact that we can now select multiple verses!

Multiple verse selection work as follows:

Copy and Share, will collect all the selected verses and concatenate it together.
Add bookmark, will only assign the bookmark to the first selected verse. Anyway this is a bookmark, it does what real bookmark does.
Write note, unfortunately the note will also be assigned to the first selected verse. It's quite complicated to enable assigning multiple verses for a note.
Highlight, will highlight all the selected verses with the selected color.

Another new major feature is bookmark labeling! Now you can assign one or more labels to your bookmarks. Labels are your way to organize your bookmarks. You can name your label salvation, faith, to memorize, learning, and so on.

Then, when you open the Bookmarks screen (press MENU and select Bookmarks), you will see a new screen.

Different from previous version where you can see bookmarks only, now you can access all your notes and your highlights from this screen. You can also select bookmarks having specific labels from that screen. To rename or delete labels, long-click on the label names below "Unlabeled bookmarks".

You can also search your bookmarks, notes, and highlights:

And 6 new colors for highlight!

I hope you enjoy the new version, and please keep giving feedbacks!

Last 1.* release before developing for 2.* (1.9.12)

2011-08-15T20:11:00.000+08:00

Originally the main feature of version 2.0 will be support for PDB files. This was pushed back to 1.9.* because I was afraid it would cause many problems because of the dynamic nature of the input. Previously the Bible text data were always internal, checked for consistency and with a fixed number of books, chapters and verses. By allowing users to open PDB files, the number of books, chapters, and verses may vary from versions to versions. It ended up that quite a lot of crashes being reported by users that could be fixed (of course not all) little by little.

English Standard Version, with italics

Other planned features for 2.x are:

Bookmark organization. Probably will use tags instead of folders (essentially, exclusive tags).
Bookmark screen to include Bookmarks, Annotations, and Highlights.
Search bookmarks and annotations.
Sort bookmarks and annotations.
Full screen view (press menu to navigate).
Option to change red text color.

Unsure features:

Multi-select verses for copy and share.
Temporary-highlighting selected verse (for example after navigating or clicking on parallel verses).

I'm still not sure what's the best way for the bookmark screen. Please leave any comments about this or any other things :) Thanks!

For Tablets (1.9.8)

2011-06-22T13:23:00.001+08:00

In the past few weeks there are many small updates that increased the version number from 1.9.2, one-by-one, until today, 1.9.8.

Historically I intended the Bible app to be compatible with Android 1.5 and up, so no one is left behind. However, according to this chart, Android 1.5 users are only 1.9%, and most of them are old phone users, which they most likely have downloaded this or some other Bible apps, and by not supporting 1.5 anymore, won't affect them so much.

Starting 1.9.8, only Android 1.6 and up are supported. Since 1.9.7 I have also changed the target SDK version to 3.1 (Android Honeycomb), but some people gave feedback to my email saying that the menus are not accessible. It happened that when I request no title bar, Android 3.* will also hide the action bar where the menus are all located by default. Hence, the app will now detect the Android version and not hide the title bar on tablets.

A screenshot from the emulator (I do not own an Android tablet):

The menu items look like toolbar buttons on the top of the screen. Other menu items such as Suggest, Help, and About are accessible from the overflow menu on the top-right corner.

PDB file reader! (1.9.2 -- 2.0 beta)

2011-06-13T20:39:00.000+08:00

After months of work, finally a new version is released! Instead of supporting only a handful list of translations/versions, now you can add in .pdb (PalmBible+) files! The core reader is made by Yohanes Nugroho, who made SymbianBible and Bible plus for Blackberry.

A screen to manage Bible versions

However, once you added a PDB file to the app, you don't straight away see the Bible text. The app will convert the PDB file into a format easily understood by the app (.yes format). You can choose the encoding of the PDB file. If you open an English or some European/ Russian languages, probably UTF-8 or ISO-8859-1 are the correct encoding. You will see a preview of the text decoded with your selected encoding.

Select the encoding from the drop-down and you will see a preview

After some time (please be patient while the PDB file is read and converted!) it will appear on the list. If you see in the list there are checkboxes. Those checkboxes indicate whether the version is shown on the version list, accessible from the main menu -> Versions.

Instant version selection after you select versions that appear on the list

I hope this will be useful to those who have a personal library of .pdb files, as well as those who are new to .pdb files.

Some technical information, may be of interest to you :)

Apocrypha/ Deuterocanonical books are now supported. This only happens if you open a .pdb file that contain those books. Now the list of books in a version is flexible. If you create a bookmark on a book that is only contained in version A but not version B, when you see the list of bookmarks while opening version B, the book names will be shown as [?] or [number] and the text will be shown as [?].
Greek/ Hebrew text is partially supported. AFAIK, right-to-left text are not yet supported in Android, and some Greek characters are missing. By the way, Greek/ Hebrew .pdb files are identified by the filename. If the filename starts with "q", it's Hebrew, if "z" it's Greek.
When you open a PDB file, it is converted to .yes file, stored in /sdcard/bible/yes/ with prefix "pdb-", such as "pdb-128de39a-1.yes". You don't actually need the .pdb files anymore.
Searching a version from PDB files is a bit slower than normal. The reason is, searching uses case-insensitive matching, and in order to support non-ascii characters, Java's toLowerCase is called, which is slower than manual lower-casing of ascii text.
Certain book numbers from the PDB files are recognized and translated to the app's native numbering. The app's native numbering starts from the Old Testament, then New Testament, then the additional books according to PalmBible+ documentation. Books with book numbers not in the known list are currently discarded.

This will be released first as the Indonesian version, and some days later as the English version. The version should be 2, but I want to pre-release as 1.9.2, because I afraid this app is not as stable as it should be due to so many internal changes!

Thanks for 50k+ downloads (Indonesian version) and 165k+ downloads (English version)! I hope this app is useful for Bible readers in the world!

Preview of version 2 - Managing Versions

2011-05-03T18:13:00.000+08:00

The Bible for Android will have a significant changes with the release of version 2. One of the notable features is the ability to add in more versions, both provided by us (.yes files) or your existing .pdb files. You will be able to enable/disable displaying the versions from the list, because when you have a lot of versions, you wouldn't want to scroll just to select one version. So, this is the screen to manage the versions.

Oh yes, and this feature will make into the English version. (Currently the English version of the app doesn't support any multiple versions).

On the bottom, there will be "Open existing file" option that allows you to select a file (.yes or .pdb) and you will be able to read tens of versions, like ESV, ASV, FAYH, etc.

Whatever mentioned here is not guaranteed to be in the final version, but please give feedbacks if any, thanks!

Version 1.4.4 release (Indonesian and English)

2011-03-17T20:02:00.001+08:00

We have just released version 1.4.4 both for Indonesian (Alkitab) and English (Quick KJV Bible).

Hendra Sentono helped me in getting a correction document from Yayasan Lembaga SABDA. The result is that we have a lot of corrections to the Indonesian text, about 100
corrections! (20-30 of which are important, and the others are like "engkaupun" becomes "engkau pun").

And, the corrected Indonesian text has been released at http://code.google.com/p/teks-alkitab/ I hope this is useful for those who want raw text for further processing (create an application, etc).

For English version, this version fixes a problem that scrolling using volume buttons emits a sound after releasing the keys, and the book names now no longer uses underscores instead of spaces.

Batak Toba version (Indonesian 1.4.2)

2011-01-17T01:00:00.000+08:00

Another kind guy Toga J. Siahaan requested me to include the Batak Toba version in the Bible app (for this case, this will only be in the Indonesian version.) He kindly gave me the BibleDatabase.org format that I asked, unexpectedly. I was very happy with his dedication. So I cannot wait any longer to release the Batak Toba version of the Bible, available as an add-on on the Indonesian Bible. (by the way, Alkitab (Indonesian Bible) has also an English interface, if you need it).

Here is the Bible in Batak Toba. The first five books are named 1-5 Musa (Moses).

A lot of Indonesian corrections (1.4.1)

2011-01-12T15:31:00.001+08:00

A kind guy called Hendra Sentono emailed me his collection of Bible text errors that are found in the Indonesian Terjemahan Baru version. The list consisted of about 30 items, and it has now been applied to the latest Indonesian version, 1.4.1. Update it from the Android Market as usual!

(I will definitely release the source text into the public, just not yet. In any case, just email me if you want the source text for use in your application.)

The KJV add-on version has also been updated with red text =)

Note for KJV add-on users prior to version 1.4.1: If you want to have red letters in KJV, you will need to manually delete this file on the SD Card: bible/yes/kjv.yes. Restart the Bible app and you will be asked to download the KJV add-on again when you select KJV from the Versions menu.

Future plans

2010-12-28T19:58:00.001+08:00

This is subject to change: and this post will be updated if necessary. Please feel free to comment below.
Scroll down for historical and latest updates on the Bible app :)

Future plans (updated 2011-01-14):

Search whole phrase e.g. +"ada di" instead of either +ada or "ada di"
Support for converting .pdb format to .yes format -- Thanks Yohanes Nugroho for the code to read .pdb format!
Lock orientation

Further plans:

Multiple verse selection

Red Letters in KJV for Jesus' Words (English 1.4)

2010-12-28T19:55:00.002+08:00

Red Letter support for King James Version (KJV) is now available!

What is "Red Letter"? Wikipedia says:

The term red letter edition is used to describe Bibles in which words spoken by Jesus, commonly only while he was on the Earth, are printed in red ink. [...] Especially in King James Bibles, this format can be useful as quotation marks are not used.

Sample text with red lettering:

John 3:3 Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. 4 Nicodemus saith unto him, How can a man be born when he is old? can he enter the second time into his mother’s womb, and be born? 5 Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.

And here is the screenshot!

Now with Red Letters!

For the source of which I obtained the red-letter formatting, it is CCEL. I didn't know about ebible at first, so I didn't get it from there, although it seems simpler to parse their formats as opposed to the more complex ThML from CCEL.

A plan to upgrade the plain KJV version to Red Letter KJV:

English version (Quick KJV Bible) will automatically get version 1.4 (no 1.3), and the red lettering is built-in, so there is no problem at all.
Indonesian version (Alkitab) will still be at 1.3 and the optional KJV add-on will still point to the plain KJV. When this version is updated (1.4.* or 1.5), the download address of KJV add-on will point to the new .yes file which contain the red lettering. However users will need to delete the kjv.yes file in the memory card so that the new KJV with red lettering will be downloaded.

Color highlight and whole-word search (1.3)

2010-12-21T17:57:00.000+08:00

Thanks to the suggestions of many people, we can now finally implement color highlights! Now your digital Bible is more colorful than ever!

Choose from 6 different colors

You can choose the highlight (or some Indonesians know it as "stabilo") color from the 6 options.

Initially I thought, how can we let the users choose the color, while allowing the users to change both the background and text colors? Won't the highlight be invisible at times, or even worse, be the same color as the text and make the text unreadable? Fortunately, we have a solution here (praise God! I didn't think of it before), which is by using transparency. The highlight color is applied 50% only (50% alpha for geeks). The result is great! See the same screens below when using different color themes. All the text are still greatly readable.

Another new feature is whole-word search. I got the idea when I was trying to search Adam in the New Testament, but I got so many "padamu" (on you) and "kepadamu" (onto you). Now you can search for +adam to get the exact-word, the person, Adam. Remember not to put spaces after the plus sign.

That person, Adam

Also, I would like to thank 10,000 downloaders of the Indonesian version! Thanks for all your encouraging suggestions and comments on the Android Market!

KJV Update (1.2.2)

2010-11-04T17:58:00.000+08:00

Almost together with yesterday's release, KJV version is also released today.

The version number is 1.2.2, similar to yesterday's release, with a small change: donation menu and some small enhancements. Currently there are 13k downloads of the KJV version, and I hope to get some support from the users, especially when I don't have a full-time job now.

Thanks for all your suggestions and encouragements!

Donation menu

Minor but useful updates (1.2.1)

2010-11-04T03:01:00.000+08:00

Version 1.2.1 of the Indonesian version has just been released! (English version will be coming shortly, maybe after I add a donation button).

There are 4 small changes:

Scroll thumb is enabled in search result. Acually I have implemented SectionIndexer that displays the book name when scrolling, but I cancelled it because it cannot show more than one character for the section name.
Progress dialogs in import/export bookmarks. Furthermore I put the importing into a transaction to make it faster.
Some section headings were shifted in Ecclesiastes.
History showed something like [255] 3:1 if one navigates using Jump To but doesn't write the book name.

History, quoted searches, and some small fixes (1.2)

2010-10-19T13:14:00.000+08:00

Time to release another update! By the way, the download count for Indonesian version is 5168, and for the King James Version is 9333. Thanks to all users for giving ratings and suggestions.

Previously, you can click on the big button on the middle bottom to open up the navigation screen where you can select the book name, chapter and verse numbers; or long-click it to open up the dialog where you can type directly the verse address like Luk 7:7. This can be inverted from the Settings.

However, I myself seldom use both methods interchangeably. I suppose that the others feel so too, which means to use one preferred method only.

Whereas the "history" is missing, nowhere to recall last navigations if you don't bookmark them. So in this release, holding the verse address button shows you the last 10 navigations (from Go to, Jump to, click on bookmarks, and a click on search results). It doesn't look perfect and I'm not sure whether this is useful, so please give some feedbacks.

History pop-up

Now quotes are supported on searches! Now you can put quotes between words to search for an exact phrase. For example, searching for "jesus christ" (with quotes) will only return results that contain the word christ after the word jesus. May this help you to search even easier.

Other changes include font size scaling for parallel links, performance improvements for book list in the Go To screen, and the ability to copy and share devotion text.

Get it on Android Market! (search for KJV or Alkitab with "Yuku" as the the publisher).

Mistakes in Indonesian Bible source text

2010-10-18T13:10:00.000+08:00

Since more than 10 years ago, digital versions of Indonesian Bible text has appeared everywhere on the Internet. Some uses .pdb format (as it was used by Palm Bible reader), some plain text, and some has been processed into HTML format. I actually wondered how did that digital format come into existence, since LAI (Lembaga Alkitab Indonesia, Indonesian Bible Society) does not seem to publish them, nor there is a "transcriber" named for copying the whole Bible book into digital format.

I myself am very thankful for the efforts, since without it we won't have digital Bibles in Indonesian. The problem is strangely, there are many typing errors (or seems to be more of converting errors) that propagates to many sites. For example, (I marked them in [square brackets]):

Titus 2:12 Ia mendidik kita supaya kita meninggalkan kefasikan dan keinginan-keingina[n] duniawi...
Yeh 11:20 supaya mereka hidup menurut segala ketetapan-Ku dan peraturan-peraturan-K[u] ...

For now I can't think of a better way of correcting it besides doing it manually, by using a spell checker (sadly, no spell checker for Indonesian is good enough for this) or -- which we are very thankful -- based on comments that people send.

Now, more than 10 corrections have been made to the source text. None of them is significant enough as to change the meaning of the text. Most of them are only truncations of the last few letters as the example above. So, don't worry.

English Version! (1.1)

2010-09-08T12:57:00.001+08:00

Now that we have King James Version text, why not translate the app into English and publish it too, with KJV as the default text? Yes, that's interesting!

Although there are many KJV Bible app on Android Market, I believe some people will be more confortable with this app, namely the speed of displaying Bible text which I found is faster than most of the available apps. And also the (hopefully) clean user interface that minimizes distraction when reading the Bible.

So, yeah, doing this is not a small task for me. The following was done in order to release the English version of the app.

Moving all translatable strings from the code to strings.xml (Eclipse feature to mark literal strings as error helps a lot)
Translating the strings.xml into English
Changing literal string references in resource files to @string/* resource references
Converting KJV text to internal format (not .yes file, since this file is not seekable if stored inside an .apk file)
Putting some logic to differentiate different enabled features between the Indonesian app and English app (e.g. No devotion, help, and versions yet for the English build)
Modifying icon colors
Moving all code base from yuku.alkitab package to yuku.alkitab.base package. This is done such that compiling resources (the R file) into different package does not severely affect import statements on the Java sources.

The result: different application from the same (similar) code base:

English edition of the app!

Actually I didn't get a nice idea how to name the app. If I just named it "KJV Bible", it will be similar to those other app in the market. Maybe I will emphasize the quickness of the app, so I put "Quick" prefix. If you have some suggestion for the naming, please let me know!

And finally, this is the screenshot of the English interface.

English! No devotions, no version switch, no help yet

By the way, this is called version 1.1 and released before the Indonesian release of 1.1 which will have more features enabled.

Adding other Bible versions / translations

2010-08-16T17:12:00.000+08:00

We can only now see Indonesian Terjemahan Baru (New Translation) text. It is very impossible to view other translations like King James or even Bahasa Sehari-hari (Conversational Language) in Indonesian. Many people have requested this, but I had decided that 1.0 will not have this feature. Since 1.0 has been release, it's time to think of this feature.

It is not easy to add support for more versions. First we don't want to make the installer size bigger, because most of Android devices in the market do not use Android 2.2 that supports installation to external storage. Hence, the additional versions need to be downloaded separately as add-on, where the data files will be stored on an external storage (SD Card).

Another problem is deciding on the format of the additional modules. The requirements are:

Must be seekable (no decompression or parsing of large blocks before reading)
Must be single file (it's hard to manage multiple files easily)
Must be (quite) extensible
Must support section headings and parallels
Must have minimal seek count to read a whole chapter

That's difficult.

Actually there are many formats of Bible data, but I could not find one that is well-documented enough (and even, my data format is also not well-documented :p). So, yes, another data format for Bible text.

The file ends in .yes (it just sounds nice) and is downloaded from Google's free web/app hosting service, appspot.com. I can be sure that it won't be down so often and I configure the .yes files as static files, so Google will use content distribution system to optimize access speed.

For next release, I convert BIS (Bahasa Indonesia Sehari-hari) from bibledatabase.org text and sabda.org section headings and parallels, and King James / KJV text from bibledatabase.org to .yes format and made it available on the main menu of the Bible app. Finally, you see the first English text after so many Indonesian screenshots in this site!

King James Version

All the book names change. When entering the verse address, "Kej" (Kejadian aka Genesis) will not work, but "Gen" will.

And this is the dialog to choose the version:

Select Version

Now, we have an English text, why do we publish only the Indonesian Bible app? Why not translate the app into English and publish it too? Stay tuned!

1.0 Release

2010-08-04T10:30:00.027+08:00

8 months after the first development, finally 1.0 is released!

New features and many clean ups from the previous version is here:

Indentations for Psalms
Neater verse display, with regular line spacing
Can keep screen on when reading
New search engine without pre-indexing
Move to different books when going prev/next chapters
Share verses via SMS, Email, etc according to installed apps
Annotations to verses
Bookmarks can have editable titles
Customizable colors with color themes or free choice
Font size can be more freely set with real preview
Small title bar for chapter address
Searching can be narrowed down to OT/NT
Much neater scrolling using up/down buttons
High-resolution icons for hdpi devices
Correction to many typos in the Bible text - available for request
Status message when downloading devotions
Renungan Harian devotion now has clickable verse addresses
Go To screen made fit for small screens
New graphics for left/right buttons

All the glory is for God alone!

Soli Deo Gloria

Download it from the Android Market by searching "Alkitab" or scanning the QR code below:

http://market.android.com/search?q=bible+yuku (openable on devices only)

Preparing for 1.0 -- colors galore

2010-07-29T02:57:00.024+08:00

Do we need to stick with black background, white text, and blue verse numbers? User feedback says No!

Previously there is a setting to change the brightness of the text - the text stays white (or gray), the background is still black. Many requests say they want white background and black text.

Rather than satisfying individual request, why not allow us to customize the colors as free as we want?

Select color dialog

The above select color dialog is inspired by Adobe Photoshop. It was not easy for me to create that, because I need to understand combining gradient paints and converting between color values. I'm thinking of open sourcing this component soon [Update: now available].

But -- isn't it troublesome to select the colors for each of the background, text, and verse numbers?

Now we have Color Themes. Instead of selecting the colors one by one, we have presets for users to choose. They have names (in Indonesian), but they're just meaningless really.

Color Theme
2 Blackboard
3 Tropic Lush
4 Moss Lake
5 Warm Ash
6 Sweet Orange

Now we are not forced to see black-and-white anymore, but colors! The colors are applied for bookmarks and devotion screens too ^^

Colorful enough?

Preparing for 1.0 -- new search engine

2010-07-18T04:00:00.046+08:00

There is a happy and sad moments recently. Happy because Google has just released Android 2.2, a very cheerful update that speeds up most applications by about 2x. My phone become super fast. Sad because the full-text search powered by SQLite FTS3 does not work anymore.

So I think, while the have-to-make-index-first thing is not so good too, it's better to make another search engine that doesn't use SQLite. Instead, the words are searched by scanning the Bible text and finding substrings. If there are multiple words, the subsequent words are looked for from the earlier result.

Performance was not satisfying - on the first correct attempt it took 2.5 minutes to search one word when running in the emulator (~40 seconds on Nexus One). The slowness I found are in:

Reading of Bible text data which uses custom UTF8 decoder (the internal UTF8 decoder was even slower!)
Call to String#indexOf for each verse
Case-insensitive matching that uses toLowerCase

After the following optimizations, it took only 3 seconds to search a word on Nexus One.

Currently the Bible data is all ASCII, I skip the UTF8 decoder altogether and convert the bytes using String(byte[], int)
Instead of calling it for each verse, I call it for each chapter, if something is found, then the verses are identified.
Because of number 1, I can use simpler methods to convert upper case letters to lower case just by adding 0x20 to all uppercase letters.

The downside of this custom search engine is that it's longer to search (it was < 1 second when using FTS3 engine) and no support for * and quotes. The advantages are no additional space required to store the index, the words need not be exact, and we can filter OT and NT.

Searching for two non-consecutive words

Preparing for 1.0 -- improved bookmarks and annotations

2010-07-15T01:55:00.000+08:00

Up until the previous version, we can only store bookmarks according to the verse we select. No other information is available, nothing we can type and store. Moreover many users ask about the ability to write notes.

So in this version we added annotations to write notes and ability to give a title to bookmarks.

Bookmark title can be assigned

Annotations

It is quite complicated to handle old bookmarks. When the program is started, it checks if there are bookmarks in the old version, and converts it to the newer format on startup.

Moreover, when there is a bookmark for a verse or there is an annotation assigned to the verse, there will be icons on the right side of the text.

Icons on the right of verse 1

If you notice, the arrows for prev/next chapters have also changed. That icon is made with help of Jaya Satrio Hendrick. I hope you like that new, simpler icons.