Posts Tagged ‘bible software’

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Tablet App Ideas

Tuesday, December 20th, 2011

Not Everything on the iPad is An Easy Drink - Share on OviAm writing this as I am preparing a presentation on tablet computers in ministry for the Mobile Ministry Forum. Some application ideas have come to mind as I’ve looked at the sad state of things in this niche of persona/mobile computing:

Choose Your Biblical Adventure
In the mode of the Choose Your Adventure books of my youth, wouldn’t it be suitable to create an interactive ebook which takes a selection of Bible stories and allows a person to insert themselves into the story. When they choose a route that follows the chronology of literal reading of the text, the person is shown the reference to the text. Such an application would be built with the in-app purchases tech so that stories can be added over time instead of getting the entire text at once.

Color Me A World
A coloring book which draws solely on Genesis 1. As each “day” is colored, additional items appear in the screen to be detailed/colored. Maybe add something like a canvas/palette enhancement where you might only get a few colors to start with, but by the time you get to the 6th day, you have the complete color wheel. Limited use, but invites the artist to join into the understanding of what God went through when creating the world.

Life of a Disciple
Given that there’s little known about most of the disciples, a comic that uses art, text, and video to expand the story of following Christ through that perspective. Something like a cross between Operation AJAX and The Jesus Film Project’s My Last Day.

Scout Out the Land
Using Google Maps/Earth, create a photo book which encourages a person to see the lands talked about in the Bible as if they were walking through it. Here, they’d choose the century/kingdom, and then be pulled down ground-level to the land and its up to them to explore and collect facts. After a certain amount of facts are collected, the maps zoom out and the Scriptures along with other data are given to fill in the blanks about the stories.

Beatitudes Devotional
A 30 day devotional based on the Beatitudes (Matthew 5:3-12, Luke 6:20-26) in which a person is invited to write, record (audio/video), or link to a demonstration of that beatitude. 

Seriously, all that I’m seeing in the app store is variations on Bible/devotionals. How about we take things a considerable step forward and actually using the tablet space to instigate maturity in the faith, but making applications that compel us to want to share the outcomes of our steps in Christ?

 

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OSNOVA and Designing Effective In-Bible Interfaces

Wednesday, December 14th, 2011

Of the few complaints that you tend to hear from those using Kindles/Nooks/Kobos and similar eInk-based reading devices, the primary ones have to do with the speed of navigating while inside of a book. Getting around to different materials isn’t so much the problem for some. Its when they want to get around inside of the materials that there’s a challenge, and sometimes a disappointment.

Over at This Lamp, a commentary on the user interface (UI) refinements made with OSNOVA have been published. This gets me excited because of my personal history with mobile Bible interfaces (Palm Bible+ and Katana specifically) and the amount of work that needs to go into making just getting around as efficient and productive as possible. Here’s a snippet of This Lamp’s observations:

…So, if a Kindle user wants to go directly to a verse, in many non-OSNOVA Kindle Bibles, he or she would have to go to the menu on the Kindle, then table of contents, then scroll through the pages until the book of the Bible sought after appears. Some ebook Bibles have chapter numbers listed, but I’ve seen other Bibles in which the Contents merely takes one to the first chapter in the selected book. With OSNOVA’s DVJ, a specific verse can be accessed directly by typing in an abbreviated form that works with the Kindle. So, if I want to go to Romans 1:17, I’d type ro 1 17 and the Kindle immediately jumps to that location in the Bible…

Read the rest of This Lamp’s experiences with OSNOVA. Also, check out the OSNOVA website for optimized documents for Kindle, Nook, Kobo, and other eInk devices. There are also several tutorial videos on this interface at the OSNOVA blog.

The Efficient Interface Is the One That’s Transforms Lives

One of the best selling features for a Bible/reading application is the efficiency of the user interface. In talking with friends about my iPad during Thanksgiving meals, one of the comments against the iPad was that people couldn’t see how a device like a tablet would be conductive to annotation behaviors such as writing on margins, highlighting, proofreading, and cut-pasting-mashing up more than just lines of text. In that conversation, I demonstrated the abilities of Good Reader (an iPad document reader with many of those features). Upon using it for themselves, the viability of eReaders and tablets became more relevant.

Hence the challenge for user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) folks:design into content pleasurable experiences which take advantage of the technology, not simply repeat the behaviors of less capable media.

 

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From the Perspectives of Teachers

Tuesday, November 22nd, 2011

A few years back, SBL Bible Software Shootout was taken for a very different direction when it was realized how well Bible software on mobile devices had evolved. This came across as a strange “finding” from our perspective seeing how long we’d been speaking of the virtues of using mobile devices for Bible studies considering the ease of access to content, the efficiency of the UI, and generally speaking, the cost of the products.

Yet OliveTree and others showed very well that while they might not always be the preferred tool for creating sermons and studies, they were no less capable than “full” software packages commonly found on pastor’s desktops and laptops. This year’s SBL Bible Software Shootout reintroduces the mobile component – especially because of the popularity of the iPad – and gets an additional curveball in some responses towards using this software not from a company’s perspective, but from an instructor’s perspective.

From this year’s SBL Bible Software Shootout 2: Revenge of the Teachers, Biblical Studies and Technological Tools offers some commentary towards these presentations:

Logos: Two professors from Calvin College, Dean Deppe and Carl Bosma, presented on their use of Logos in their classrooms. Calvin College has a 2 week gateway course that is a required part of the curriculum to introduce Logos to the students. An important aspect of the instruction is both learning how to use the program and to start the process of using it to take notes.

  • A 1 hour introduction
  • Four 2 hour sessions explaining features with MDiv students
  • Three 3 hours sessions with MA students.

Deppe showed examples of how he has used Logos. (Cf. Deppe’s All Roads Lead to the Text: Eight Methods of Inquiry into the Bible for his work on using Logos for exegetical examples. I have now acquired the book and will provide a review here, hopefully before the new year.) He demonstrated how he thinks in terms of various lenses for viewing the texts using various Logos tools: Personal Book Builder to collect notes, Collections for searching, Passage Analysis, highlighting, layouts, visual filters including sympathetic highlighting, tools that can be used for students who don’t know Greek or Hebrew, etc. He showed an interesting example of highlighting of verb tenses in Romans 7 along with quite a number of layouts he has created for working with grammatical, exegetical, background, related texts (e.g., DSS, Josephus, Pseudepigrapha).

Bosma showed how he used Logos for notetaking and linking to local and web resources.

Again, there’s nothing radically new here, unless you look a bit deeper into what’s happening. The SBL Shootout is usually composed of companies skilled to develop towards the tnedencies of academics, not necessarly the most mobile-friendly audiences, and definitley one with a different paradigm towards teaching emthods. There was a heavier emphasis on the presenters here to be led towards applying the text of Scripture, but also demonstrating their methods towards dissecting and interpreting the meaning of the text based on what’s worked in instructor-led settings (languages, cultures, etc.). If you will, you are getting an opinion out of the actual use of the product, not simply the features that the developer wants to most demonstrate (biased towards their marketing/compitence). When you get the presentation of the capability of the software from the perspective of the teacher, you begin to see a bit more how this is used in such settings (wealth and warts) and can start to discern a bit more contexually the strengths of the software versus the stregths of the teacher.

What’s not clear from the commentary is how the reception was from students who engaged instructors that prepared these materials. Were the classes better managed? Or, where there additional challenges getting (some/most) students information in a manner that didn’t just work best for teaching the concepts, but also their devices? Clearly, the software is in a better place. And now hearing the academicly-tuned Biblical/religious community share their lessons-learned is great. The question is how can these persectives be rolled up into something of a working document for best practices for others who wish to have some insight or clarity towards instructing to this depth from a mobile device, connected software, and theological perspective.

I like some of the discussion here about the utilization of Apple’s iCloud. In some conversations with ministers recently, iCloud has come up as something they very much liked because it meant that they were better able to take what they needed from a laptop setting and have that on their mobile or tablet as they went. Again, this isn’t a radical change from what we’ve demonstrated and talked about here (its really syncing, though more than just calendar/contact data as many of you have done via Exchange, PalmSync, etc., without the fun of pushing a button to say so), but the acceptance of the behavior to prepare and be ready to teach a lesson is something to note. On our end, products such as Dropbox and Idea Flight have been quite useful towards instructor-led engagements. Though, simply putting your items on a server and then provoking interaction from that point has also been quite demonstrative.

Read the rest of the commentary about the SBL Shootout 2 from Biblical Studies and Technological Tools and then consider how you are leveraging these technologies to teach clearer or better. It might be that you create something similar to a traditional lecture-based course, or, that you might make something more along the lines of the Cybermission’s Mobile Ministry Training Course which goes towards a different direction of technical competence for instructors. In either respect, going mobile isn’t an excuse for not being able to handle teaching a lesson – the tools are there, are your teaching chops and students up for the rest?

 

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After You’ve Gained the Knowledge, Then You…

Monday, July 25th, 2011

Image: Dual pane view of Bible+ showing KJV and ESVA recent tweet by the Folks at Audio Bible/Faith Comes by Hearing (@audiobible) got me thinking (again):

If u could carry the Bible around with u in more than 500 languages – like in your pocket – how would u use it? #Hmmmm #GreatCommission

Original tweet.

I used to carry 1, then 2, then 15, and at one time over 100 Bibles around with me on my mobile devices (thanks Bible+). At the time, I justified it because I was (a) reading/studying Scripture a ton more than I do now, and (b) I interacted with several people who “heard” the Scriptures best in the translation they most used. Being that I was also at college during this time, it felt like the right way to approach speaking spiritual matters in a clear and consistent manner (1 Cor 14:1-19).

I don’t carry as many Bibles with me these days. In fact, until recently I didn’t carry any versions on my mobile (still no app, but I’ve got a Bible), and the ones on my iPad are the same in each Bible app or website (ESV, KJV, NET, and a few others). I’ve got less a need to carry as many versions of the Word as I do the onus to live as much of the Word so that when asked, I can give the appropriate answer to my faith (1 Peter 3:15-16). That, and the consistency of being in or near connected spaces allows me to search quickly from a series of websites when needed, or just make a note for something to come back later to.

That’s not the case for all folks. Many of the frequent travelers and missionaries I’ve met would jump at the ability to have Bibles and other texts in as many languages as needed, and at a moment’s notice. Their interactions almost require it of them. And when they are able to have something that speaks right to their audiences, it makes living among mixed groups that much easier to manage. When they don’t have that content, or even the ability to get a clear translation, their relationships to people and environments suffer.

But such use speaks to that end of things – where the tweet asked “how would you use it?” Many of use have libraries of Bibles and other content in print on bookshelves (digital and otherwise), but what have we done with it besides making it decorative? Have we taught someone to read, or took the time to use those resources to tutor people who are studying those subjects we’ve collected? Have we engaged the cultures beyond the pages and held the kinds of conversations that would amplify or change our opinions of those cultures, people, and events? Or, is it just a number?

In grade school, many of us learned about the terms kinetic and potential energy. Kinetic energy is identified by its impetus to move – the energy immediately before movement happens. Potential energy, on the other hand, is energy that is stored and is usually static due to its position or configuration. You’ve got that neat Olive Tree, Logos, YouVersion, or Bible.is app with hundreds of Bibles and other materials ready to be used. Are you in the process of transferring that energy into the lives of others, or are you configured simply to display the potential of what can be?

 

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Analyzing Mobile After Its Applied

Wednesday, June 8th, 2011

In the previous post, we talked about how innovation needs to be relevant for it to have some kind of initial impact. How about we look at things later? For example, one of the questions that we pose to groups that want to work with MMM is: what else are you expecting to happen after the introduction of ‘X’ to your community?

If you will, is it possible to look far enough down the road towards the application of mobile or web technology to see some of the implications that you just won’t be able to control? For example, a group decides to add mobile technology to improve the ability for people groups to communicate with one another. But, doesn’t see that down the line, it was the use personal communication devices (and no longer sharing a single regional phone line) that caused group conflict, sometimes on a major scale (see the testimonies of the introduction and implications of mobile in the book Where Are You Africa).

Is it right to ask someone/organizations to be cognizant of the effects of mobile that can be so far down the line that its not (technically) controllable? I think so. And I think it comes in how we approach the technology as driver towards some kind of intended outcome.

What is the intended outcome of having a device that takes someone attention to their mobile device for one hour, instead of 5 minutes (the time spent on a game versus checking email)? With heads down that long, are we expecting that they will become less attached to the technology and more attached to reflection? Or, are we expecting that what we are doing is simply replacing an analogy behavior that’s done already? If we had them head down playing our ministry game/watching our movie, they now have a need to charge their device in more places. So there’s a purchase to extra batteries, car chargers, etc. They are using it more often so we now have to add sermons and teachings on fixing one’s attention spans. And the list goes on.

I’m not necessarily of the thought that gadgets are making us stupider or stealing aspects of our humanity, only that we haven’t totally thought through the implications of using this technology. While we can start for ministry (good, serving) needs, the impacts are always further. Being honest with some of the projects and applications we’ve come across, we’ve not done as good a job thinking ahead of use. That’s going to cause some unintended consequences. Some of these we’ll be ok with, but others might cause problems much too large for an application (or Facebook revolution) to solve.

 

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Addition of Ink Makes Tablet a Better Bible?

Wednesday, May 25th, 2011

HTC Flyer screenshot of Bible app with ink, via Mobile GadgeteerThis past weekend, Matt Miller opined that the new HTC Flyer Tablet might make for the right approach to being a digital bible replacement because of it’s inking ability. During this specific look at the HTC Flyer, Matt notes just how well the ability to ink on the screen adds to the experience that many Bible reading applications already offer.

Spending much of my reading time on a tablet, I can relate to how well this can work within many application environments and communities. And as Matt also shows, using a service like Evernote along with is could also pull some of those behaviors that some are used to (writing in margins, etc.) into a digital domain to take advantage of some of the capabilities that paper just wouldn’t have.

This is a use case more centric to tablet (and even laptop) use. And so we should be careful not extrapolating it to every mobile device that can handle ink. Inking, specifically as we are looking at it here, takes advantage of the larger screen spaces tablets offer, and could also blend some spatial interfaces not used as well on small mobiles.

If inking could work, what are some ways that you could see the exploration of Scripture draw someone into a better understanding of it, or even help a small community better understand how to study the bible together (a community sketchnote if you will)?

 

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Using A Print (Paper) Bible Alongside the Digital

Tuesday, May 24th, 2011

LunchOver at the Laridian blog, a post about using a print bible alongside a digital bible caught my eye. Here is a snippet:

This year was different though. Maybe it was the fact that we were going through the book of Isaiah or maybe I’m not so rigid anymore, but towards the end of the year I dusted off my print Bible and started using it both in answering my lessons and in class, along with my phone. I really liked having the whole passage open for review. That is the one thing missing on my phone (although an iPad could help with that).

My secret weapon though is still my iPhone. While we can’t consult commentaries and reference material, I have a variety of translations installed on my iPhone. When the NIV leaves me wondering, I can quickly review a verse or passage in the Amplified, NLT or Message and I’m not cheating one bit. I also do that when I’m working on my lesson at home for the following week. And it is still much more convenient to look up related passages using my phone than to flip around the Bible.

Read the rest at the Laridian Blog.

How about you? Have you gone from print to digital to a hybrid mix of both? If so, what were your reasons?

 

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The Casualty of Symbian Bible Apps

Monday, May 16th, 2011

In a lot of respects, its rare to talk about Bible apps for one specific platform – there so many – the causality of Bible apps for the Symbian platform has been one of those questions that has gnawed at me a bit. Not so much even for the lack of applications, but the missed opportunities because of where the Symbian platform has been represented.

What is Symbian?

Symbian is a mobile operating system and platform that’s been used by Nokia, Samsung, Motorola, Fujitsu, and LG for mobile phones. To date, there have been over 600 million devices shipped and sold with the Symbian operating system, making it one of the most prolific  in use.

Nokia has been quite adept at making Symbian fit its needs. It has pretty much been selling Symbian devices longer than people have given credence to there even being a category called smartphones. To that end, Symbian has been deployed with more carriers and in more world  regions than all but the most basic of Java handsets.

Unfortunately, it is also considered an older platform that while stable and optimized for mobile devices, falls quite far behind some of the newer entrants in respect to ease-of-use, developer tools, and ease of finding applications. And so Symbian recently befell Nokia’s reorganization efforts (first spun into an open source platform, and now to be greatly minimized  over the next years  to be replaced by Windows Phone).

Symbian and Bibles

By accident of niche, Biblical software usually is a fairly easy one to fill. Find a publisher that has the languages that you want to address, write the application to deliver it, and then make it available. The issue with Symbian is that its actually a pretty difficult platform to build on. Without getting too technical, its just plain to say that developers have needed to had a certain type of older technical knowledge (previously) or invest in toolsets (Qt, Java, etc.) which required a good amount of patience before progress.

When I moved to the Symbian platform in 2008, there wasn’t much to find for Bible apps. Laridian, Olive Tree, Symbian Bible, and Go-Bible were pretty much your only options. And for a while, this was just fine and covered most of the Symbian devices that were in existence. When Symbian went to a touch-based user interface (UI), things got a lot fragmented, and Symbian Bible pretty much became the only option (Best eBible came on the scene later). Which was good and not good – a free application, using Bibles formatted for the Palm Bible+ application, and had no support for newer translations. Newer platforms ended up with a very easy “in” for adoption, they had what people could read, and could find.

A Missed Opportunity…

In light of all of that history, its easy to say that Symbian (and the companies associated with that platform) might have missed an opportunity to take a platform that has already made considerable inroads even further. But, it had a good bit going against it, and so it is now in the position it is in.

But does that mean that all potential opportunity for this platform have been lost? I’d say no, if technical aptitude is seen as a gift that can benefit the Body. When I say technical aptitude, a platform (like Symbian, but all qualify here) benefits by such knowledge as developer tools, device interfaces, language mapping, usage analytics, etc. A person who is skilled in any of these areas would be a suitable team member for a larger project creating an application, service, or refining a digital faith experience. These persons have to be looked for in “not normal places” as their gift isn’t something you’d find in Exodus on the way to creating a mobile altar (Exodus 25-27).

There’s also the benefit of much of Symbian’s assets being made available in open forums (for example Forum Nokia), through some open source technologies (for example Qt), and through the continued ownership of Symbian devices (installed-based analysis by Vision Mobile). In effect, there’s a lot of folks out there who can still benefit from a Bible solution on this platform.

The Lesson for Other Mobile Platforms

It is easy for the market, and popular (loud) opinion to state where you should place your development resources. Certainly, making plans for mobile software you’ve got to take into account devices, services, and experiences (the entire frame of mobile) and what is currently and what will be in the years to come.

When it comes to religious software, you also have the opportunity to always tap into the installed base of current users. Many times, your frequent fans and users of digital faith items will not splurge on the latest devices or services, though they will want to receive some of the same experiences that newer devices offer. It is in this that the opportunity lies, and where its possible to not just make a product, but help drive older platforms to a friendlier sunset.

Currently, there are several mobile platforms that have come and gone (Epoc, PalmOS, Windows Mobile), and some that are pretty much on their last legs (Symbian, older versions of Android and iOS, RIM’s BB OS 6 and earlier). Developers looking to cut their teeth on a mobile platform to learn and to provide experiences should not forget these platforms. And at the same time, you should go into any project with a clear (and simple) goal and definitive timeline. You  will not be able to support those devices for very long when the official support has faded.

Lastly, when you are a platform that has cultured a community of content, but you are no longer able to support that platform, utilize the open code and support communities of Code.Google, Forum Nokia, SourceForge, GitHub, and others as places to put your code and release notes. There might be someone willing to take up the project, or at least help you migrate your project’s contents into a newer platform. For example, MMM participated in an effort to update the Rapier Bible application for Maemo 5 devices, fixing some linger bugs, but that also set the stage to develop (and later release into widespread testing) a Bible application written in Qt from the ground up called Katana. The rewritten application leans on lessons of the former, but has a much longer viable life because of decisions made early on to support certain content and programming hooks.

For Symbian, it may very well be the case that the sun is setting for it as a leading mobile platform. It is also the case that there are some years and various regions of users that still haven’t been served with digital faith content though having a platform capable of supporting it. Do keep that in mind as you consider your mobile strategies, and remember to study the past platforms for what is probably going to happen to many others in a nearer-than-you-can-expect future.

 

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