I feel that something is still missing before I can say that the Bible app has a version number of 1.0. What is missing? The iPhone app that har made has section headings for the verses (Indonesian: Judul Perikop).
So I ask him how to get those data. He said that he got that from a Mac program that shows section headings on Indonesian Bible, and he was able to extract the files as HTML files. However I found some typos in the section headings, in fact I saw several times in a while, so I thought I needed to copy them from my physical Bible book.
Turned out that sabda.org has the section headings all listed together! I’m so thankful to sabda.org, they have a very comprehensive resources for Bible especially for Indonesian bible study. I need to create a parser that converts the verse addresses mentioned in the page to the internal addressing used in the app. For example,
Judul: Manusia dan taman Eden
Perikop: Kej 2:8-25 (TB)
is converted to: title=”Manusia dan taman Eden” address=0x000208 (where 0x00 is the book number (0 is Genesis), 0x02 is chapter number, and 0x08 is verse number).
The problem is on the inserting of the section headings into the verse texts. I need a big concentration to write the code to insert them correctly without impacting performance too much. At the end I used two files for the section headings, one is the index where everything will be loaded into memory, and another contains all the texts of the headings.
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| Section headings shown |
Even better, there are parallels, which indicate similar or same stories in different part of the Bible. One example,
Judul: Silsilah Yesus Kristus
Perikop: Mat 1:1-17 (TB)
Paralel: Luk 3:23-38 (TB)
which means the texts in Matthew 1:1-17 is essentially the same story as what is told in Luke 3:23-38. I want to make the parallels appear as links that can be clicked to go directly to the verse.
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| The parallels are shown, it is clickable to jump directly to the verse |
Some fine tuning was applied for the verse address parser to recognize dash sign (which is, if “Mat 26:47-56” is clicked, it will be recognized as “Mat 26:47”).
So 0.9 was released (0.9.1 was shortly after released to fix a strange bug), and I am very happy with this, since most of the Bible app don’t have section headings and parallels. I hope this app is useful for you, to study God’s Word better.