Future plans

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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

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)

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.

  1. Moving all translatable strings from the code to strings.xml (Eclipse feature to mark literal strings as error helps a lot)
  2. Translating the strings.xml into English 
  3. Changing literal string references in resource files to @string/* resource references
  4. Converting KJV text to internal format (not .yes file, since this file is not seekable if stored inside an .apk file)
  5. 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)
  6. Modifying icon colors
  7. 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

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:

  1. Must be seekable (no decompression or parsing of large blocks before reading)
  2. Must be single file (it’s hard to manage multiple files easily)
  3. Must be (quite) extensible
  4. Must support section headings and parallels
  5. 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

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)