All Books Project Update

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At the end of 2011, we started a project called All Books as an exercise in developing a Bible reader interface that was based around a spatial oriented UI than the normal list/task UI scheme. As the year has progressed, development has as well. There’s been some healthy learning about the limitations of using the Nokia Web Browser on my N8 as the baseline for this. Some lessons towards JavaScript and what works efficiently and what doesn’t. And a few more lessons here and there.

At the end of last month, I got around a Windows PC and was able to send to GitHub the updates that have been pending for the All Books Project (as of right now, I’ve not seen a solid GitHub app for the iPad that works with the web developer app Textastic; open to recommendations). So, if you aren’t watching that repo, I would recommend that you take a look at All Books on GitHub and download the update. Here’s the summary of the updates

UI Updates:

  • added HTML5 local storage for usage stats (needs fixing)
  • fixed a number of books which had incorrect URL pointers
  • fixed issue with navigation where stats wouldn’t hide
  • fixed issue with navigation where clicking on All Books from OT hid OT books instead of keeping them seen
  • shortened text on Reset Stats button

CSS Updates:

  • added CSS for stats area
  • added text-ellipsis for buttons

Now, remember, All Books is just a web-based interactive container (HTML5, jQuery for JavaScript, and CSS3). The content that I am feeding to this comes from Bible.org and several other sources (noted in the UI About section). You can pretty much take any directory of HTML documents that are Biblical in content and point this UI to. No, its not as clean as Browser Bible, YouVersion, OliveTree, and the others. This is in part by design. In order to know what works and what doesn’t you’ve got to sometimes get into things and build it yourself.

That said, All Books is also designed to be a gift to the folks at Bible.org. They have an excellent HTML package of the NET (New English Translation) Bible, but the HTML interface for it wasn’t the easiest to use on tablet and mobile devices. All Books answers that interface question, and sets the ground for the kind of interface that (when scripted) can easily translate across languages and levels of literacy. So to that end, I hope the Bible.org folks can appreciate these and keep pushing the Gospel forward.

If you have comments towards All Books, or would like to contribute to the project, visit the All Books Project on GitHub and just jump right on in. As for me, there’s an upcoming update to my Nokia N8 which might help performance issues, and finally get me on ball to some of the next features for this.