Hi Troy, I just thought I would mention that I have also been playing around with Android.
I have spent the last few weeks creating a prototype bible viewer application for Android, but I just noticed Troy's messages in this forum. I took a slightly different technical approach to you and I don't know which is better and I also came at this project with the aim of creating a mobile bible viewer I could tweak and improve rather than specifically to write an Android front end for Sword. By way of information I thought I would outline my approach and what led me to start. I have used Pocket e-Sword for many years but development has now ceased on Pocket e-Sword and it is already looking a bit old, as is WinMob that it runs on, so I started thinking what to use in the future. Although I loved using Pocket e-sword there were one or two things that I would have loved to change if I had access to the source but the source was closed. Most pocket bible apps seem to be closed source and many charge money or depend on being on-line so I began to think about writing my own. I have been writing Java code for a living since the 90's. I looked at Java ME which unfortunately is not supported by recent, popular, trend-setting phones like iPhone and Android and started going that route but there doesn't seem to be much http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1414288/j2me-vs-android-vs-iphone-vs-symbian-vs-windows-ce buzz around Java ME at the moment. I briefly thought of iPhone but refuse to learn Objective-C, buy a Mac, and bend over backwards to get the app into App Store. Then I realised that Google have built Android primarily for Java Applications and Gartner predict that by 2012 Android will outsell the iPhone so I downloaded the Android SDK and am impresed by the application framework Google have put into Android. Incidentally I went to a fascinating talk on Android by Reto Meier yesterday evening. As Android hosts Java apps so well it seemed a good idea to use java front to back so I downloaded the jSword and sword-Common projects back-end to serve the OSIS documents and started creating a Java front-end for jsword on Android so I have now been doing that for the last couple of weeks off and on. I included the jsword and common jars in my Android app and simplified the xslt template I found in bible-desktop and now have a basic bible viewer app. Troy, I am interested to see that you use jni to access a C back-end. Is that right? Does this give better performance or is there another reason. In the front end I am currently using a TextView but briefly used a WebView which has better html support. I may have to switch back to WebView. I tried to copy the PocketSword verse selection screen but failed so I am just using 3 combos for now. I haven't used Crosswire code before and it took me a while to get used to OSIS and jsword but the code looks great and I am now familiar enough with jsword to find my way around the necessary parts. Here is a screen print of the current state: http://sword-dev.350566.n4.nabble.com/file/n2248754/android-bible1.jpg For now I am still happily trying to improve on the prototype but I could switch and contribute to a central project with others. My only aim is to create a good open source bible I can tweak and that others may find useful too. Best regards Martin -- View this message in context: http://sword-dev.350566.n4.nabble.com/Android-SWORD-tp360475p2248754.html Sent from the SWORD Dev mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ sword-devel mailing list: sword-devel@crosswire.org http://www.crosswire.org/mailman/listinfo/sword-devel Instructions to unsubscribe/change your settings at above page
