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Go Bible

For the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ and the furtherance of His Kingdom.

Contents

Who?

My name is Jolon Faichney and I go to Surf City Christian Church on the Gold Coast, Australia. I would like to acknowledge some other people for their invaluable contributions to Go Bible:

  • John Edwards from the Gold Coast - for his continued testing of Go Bible and support.
  • Søren Noer from Denmark - for producing the ThML version of the Danish Bible and helping test Go Bible on his phone.
  • Rob from Sydney - for advising me on how to set up a WAP page that is compatible with '3' phones.
  • James from Singapore - for organising the Indonesian and Apocrypha versions.
  • Roman from Hong Kong - for providing the Simplified and Traditional Chinese book names as well as helping test the Chinese versions on his Alcatel OT756.
  • Amir Fouad from Egypt - for helping test the Arabic version.
  • Paul - for making the Dutch version.
  • Olov Ennerstam - for helping with the Swedish version.
  • Kim Westberg - for helping test the Swedish version.

When?

I started programming Go Bible on July 19, 2003 when I bought my first Java phone, the Sony Ericsson T610. It took about two weeks to write Go Bible and about 2 months to work through WAP server configuration issues. On June 9, 2004 I upgraded to the Nokia 6230 which is a MIDP 2.0 phone and began working on Go Bible 2.0, which was released on June 28, 2004. I will continue to update and add new features to Go Bible. Email me at jolon@onthenet.com.au if you have any suggestions.

Why?

I wrote Go Bible because I wanted to write something for my phone plus it would be handy to have the Bible on my phone.

How?

Getting the Bible onto a phone is a bit of a challenge. Firstly you need a phone that is programmable. Most phone companies now support Java on their phones. The next challenge is finding a copy of the Bible in a form that can be downloaded to a phone. There are two well-known translations of the Bible that are free from copyright restrictions, the King James Version (KJV) and the American Standard Version (ASV), other well-known translations require licensing fees. As I intend for this program to be free, I begun with the translations in the public domain. Text and html versions of the KJV are available but they are not useful for a mobile phone application. CCEL provide the KJV and World English Bible in a format called ThML (Theological Markup Language) where every book, chapter, and verse is named and identified. I wrote a program for the PC to convert ThML to Go Bible format. The Go Bible format allows the data to be quickly accessed by the Go Bible software, however, it isn't compressed in anyway. This is because the JAR file format used to package Java software will compress the contents of the package.

The next problem is that the Bible is large even when compressed. A very efficiently compressed version of the Bible requires about 1.4MB of storage space. One problem is that phone's don't have a very large storage space, for example my Sony Ericsson T610 has only 2MB total and at least half of that is taken up by the phone book, text messages, etc. The second problem is that some phones such as the Nokias set a 64KB limit on Java applications. I have decided to make multiple collections available, some are larger, such as the entire New or Old Testaments, and some are smaller like the Gospel of John which can fit within 64KB. This gives the user the option of downloading many smaller files for a Nokia or one larger file for a Sony Ericsson.

Other challenges included keeping the application relatively fast considering that Java and phones are generally very slow. Nokias tend to be quite fast, but the application must also be able to run well on other phones.

Limitations

To jump to a verse the Go to screen requires that a phone have left and right arrows. Most Java phones have left and right arrows however I have noticed that some cheaper Nokias only have up and down arrows. If your phone doesn't have left and right arrows then the * and # keys can be used instead. In addition the book, chapter, and verse can be changed by pressing the following keys whilst viewing a verse:

  • Book: 1 and 4
  • Chapter: 2 and 5
  • Verse: 3 and 6

The search feature currently returns only the first 30 matches as some phones will run out of memory when more are returned.

Future Features

Currently Go Bible 1.0 suppports:

  • Viewing verses in an easy to read layout with Christ's words in red
  • Jumping to a different book, chapter, or verse by using the arrow keys, numeric keypad or the Go to screen
  • Searching for words in the entire Bible, book, or chapter, maximum of thirty verses returned.
  • Changing the size of the font used for displaying verses
  • KJV, Arabic, and Danish translations

Go Bible 2.0 supports the above features as well as the following:

  • The ability to SMS a verse to someone
  • Arabic, Chinese, and Indonesian translations

In the future I would also like to add support for the following features:

  • Bookmarking verses so that they can be accessed quickly later
  • Customising the look of Go Bible by changing the colours, etc.
  • Russian translation

Let me know if you would like any of these features. One thing to keep in mind is that more features means a larger application, which will also mean slower downloads, higher data call charges (if downloading directly to the phone), and less space on the phone for things such as ringtones, pictures, messages, and phone book entries. It may also mean that some books of the Bible will no longer fit on phones with a JAR size limits. So I will be careful about what new features are incorporated into Go Bible.

Availability

Go Bible is placed into the public domain just like the KJV. I couldn't imagine charging for something that helps spread the Gospel. However, in the future I may release versions that use translations that require license fees. For such versions, I will pass the license fee onto the user. However, I never intend to charge for versions of Go Bible that use translations with no licensing fees.

Have a great day!