Thread: Hymns on N900
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Posts: 1,684 | Thanked: 1,562 times | Joined on Jun 2008 @ Austin, TX
#8
Originally Posted by 2disbetter View Post
Flandry awesome stuff. Do you know if there is any scriptures or LDS manual support coming down the line. At the site pretty much EVERYTHING BUT maemo already has a native player.

On my PDA a while back I used YancyWare and it was awesome, you could hightlight, annotate, bookmark, etc.

Thanks for this!

2d
I've volunteered to work on some apps. A Mormon Channel app has been finished and awaiting them releasing it for over a month now. I'm tempted to strip trademark and copyrighted material from it and going ahead and releasing.

I am also interested in other apps. Mobile Member seems like a bad idea when you can integrate with the system . The current system does not seem like you can easily provide new contact backends and I would have to go with syncing. Qt has/will have a contact manager system that I could plug an engine into for ward lists but unfortunately it doesn't look like it'll be supported on Meego for a while. I'm unsure what it would take for an extra calendar backend but sync is always an option. I can't remember what other features it has that would be interesting.

As for scriptures I am mixed about whether to write a stand alone app or adding it as a backend to Katana.

Originally Posted by Flandry View Post
The plucker versions of the manuals and other media here work in FBReader.

The audio editions of the scriptures and conference talks can be downloaded and listened to in nQa Audiobook Player, or streamed. There are several ways of tuning into streams.
Attachment 12078
Katana is a nice little Bible reader--presently it's just that (a Bible reader, not a Bible study tool). For the other Standard Works, there's the Web Edition if you have a data plan or wifi. I have used a script to pull down a copy, strip out the cross links and references, and reformat for a small screen. I have bookmarks to this local copy in MyDocs in MicroB (i keep them on my desktop so i can just pop open to the place i was at), and it works fine to read scriptures this way. Navigating between books isn't the easiest, though.
Attachment 12077
Studying is a different matter, though. There's no ebook reader on the N900 that can do useful annotations (not considering PDF as an ebook format). SWORD, which is used as the engine for Katana, has a lot of potential, but is currently not really able to handle other books with the degree of control it does Bible translations, and in Katana only provides the text so far, no commentaries or concordance or anything.

Rant mode
The problem with Yanceyware and the other half-dozen boom-and-bust LDS-specific scripture readers is that they all used their own proprietary formats. To make matters worse, a couple of them were temporarily adopted by church media as supported formats, only to be dropped later due to changing device landscape and discontinued software (and internal policy changes, no doubt). Thus, we're left, after over 10 years of PDA scripture readers, with almost no progress toward a single, multiplatform, robust reader. What a lot of wasted effort...

The recent release of official apps for Android, WinCE, and iPhone was a surprise, but i'm not really that optimistic it's going to amount to anything different in the long run--this isn't the first episode of this i've seen or my only experience with church IT--and it doesn't help for those not in mainstream OSes. I haven't had time to look at feedback to see what the apps are like, but it's definitely a nice option for many people where there may have been none before.

Annotations in a reader are only useful if the reader (and annotations with it) doesn't disappear after a year or two or four. This is why all those commercial proprietary readers over the years really peeve me (not to mention in some cases IMO violated the copyrights of the church) and i've actually not patronized any of them. Plucker format has been supported consistently since PalmOS in about 1999 and whatever PDA i've carried since, but still the annotations, not being part of the format, did not fare so well.

I guess that's all to say that annotations and highlighting and anything besides basic reading capability are all but pointless on mobiles unless it uses an open, common format that is likely to survive that single app and platform.

No pent-up frustration over past abandoned annotations here; no sir.
When I was a Palm user I just used Plucker to read them anywhere and didn't invest my notes or other things into a platform I would lose them in. If we created a study platofrm the nice thing is we have access to the file format and can translate it for format changes.

I'm a bit more hopeful with the Church taking a stance of providing a web API and allowing people to create apps at their pleasure. I would prefer they would provide stock HTML5 apps for everything as that would work on all platforms and provide most of the basic functionality available.
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