Bible for Android Development Blog

We have just released version 1.4.4 both for Indonesian (Alkitab) and English (Quick KJV Bible).

Hendra Sentono helped me in getting a correction document from Yayasan Lembaga SABDA. The result is that we have a lot of corrections to the Indonesian text, about 100
corrections! (20-30 of which are important, and the others are like “engkaupun” becomes “engkau pun”).

And, the corrected Indonesian text has been released at http://code.google.com/p/teks-alkitab/ I hope this is useful for those who want raw text for further processing (create an application, etc).

For English version, this version fixes a problem that scrolling using volume buttons emits a sound after releasing the keys, and the book names now no longer uses underscores instead of spaces.

Another kind guy Toga J. Siahaan requested me to include the Batak Toba version in the Bible app (for this case, this will only be in the Indonesian version.) He kindly gave me the BibleDatabase.org format that I asked, unexpectedly. I was very happy with his dedication. So I cannot wait any longer to release the Batak Toba version of the Bible, available as an add-on on the Indonesian Bible. (by the way, Alkitab (Indonesian Bible) has also an English interface, if you need it).

Here is the Bible in Batak Toba. The first five books are named 1-5 Musa (Moses).

A kind guy called Hendra Sentono emailed me his collection of Bible text errors that are found in the Indonesian Terjemahan Baru version. The list consisted of about 30 items, and it has now been applied to the latest Indonesian version, 1.4.1. Update it from the Android Market as usual!

(I will definitely release the source text into the public, just not yet. In any case, just email me if you want the source text for use in your application.)

The KJV add-on version has also been updated with red text =)

Note for KJV add-on users prior to version 1.4.1: If you want to have red letters in KJV, you will need to manually delete this file on the SD Card: bible/yes/kjv.yes. Restart the Bible app and you will be asked to download the KJV add-on again when you select KJV from the Versions menu.

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

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.

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!

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

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.

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).

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] …