Hello frontend developers, As many of you know, we've been in talks since 1998 with the Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft (German Bible Society) (DBG) to distribute the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament. In 1999 they gave us official notice to stop distributing the text of the NA27. As a consolation, they suggested we direct our users to their website where they would soon make the NA27 available for download for a small fee. They have offered the NA27 in various software and formats from their website, but none we could easily and fully integrate with our engine. Things have changed over the past 10 years. CrossWire has designed and written the software for Aland's research institute (INTF) which produces the text of the Editio Critica Maior (ECM)-- the research work which the Nestle-Aland edition derives its text and apparatus. Over the past couple years, we have pitched the idea to integrate the scholarly research tools at the institute with the "pocket edition" Nestle-Aland and the result of that is what you see in Bishop under the "Witness Study", "Variant Study: Variant Graph, Alignment Table, and Digital ECM (book of Acts only)" features. They have been happy with these results and have agree to release a NA28 module for CrossWire tools, but required a few updates for this to happen.
1) They wanted a way to produce unique unlock keys per user which they would generate from their website-- which also wouldn't require re-cipher of the module data. 2) They needed a way to easily direct users to their website to purchase the unlock key when a user attempts to install the module. #1 was included as an update to our engine with this commit: commit f4ac4caeacd762c90c2b2cef5755bf745e3a6d58 Author: scribe <scribe@bcd7d363-81e1-0310-97ec-a550e20fc99c> Date: Sat Dec 29 21:23:25 2018 +0000 Added personalization mechanism for cipher keys git-svn-id: https://crosswire.org/svn/sword/trunk@3614 bcd7d363-81e1-0310-97ec-a550e20fc99c #2 was added with the inclusion of the UnlockInfo property as an accepted entry in the .conf file for a module. All this to say that I have received word that "the code generator has already been implemented in the online shop. The colleagues are recently testing the feature." I would hope this means immanent availability. As this has been an ongoing negotiation and we've received a number of positive replies with no final action over the years from the DBG, I've waited until it actually looks like they are really planning to release this, before getting anyone's hopes up. Good news is that I have also pitched this to the DBG as a way for them to keep 100% of the sale from their module, since we don't want any royalties, which should allow them to offer their resource to starving seminary students at a great discount in price. They have taken this to heart and the last word I have received is that they "are considering a really modest price of probably as low as 10 €." That's actually pretty exciting as most other modules for the NA28 which include the apparatus are priced around $25USD. Plus, a seminary student will have the added benefit of using their unlock code on any and all of our software (mobile and desktop), instead of being locked into a single application. It should be a good promotion for us and I expect the DBG website will highlight this. So, in summary, I hope this will actually happen. I am excited by this and hope everyone else will be, as well. Frontend developers: for you to support this, you will need to build against an engine release later than the commit above. For those who insist on only building against release branches (completely sympathize with this), our release manager, Greg Hellings, offered to cherry-pick changes for a new release over the past holiday season, which was relatively quiet and we never supported him in his offer, but I am hopeful this means he might be willing to pull at least this patch into our release branch. Additionally, you will need to support the new UnlockInfo .conf property in your frontend. To see how it is used in Bishop, you can try (both iOS and Android are the same) to install the NA28 module from DBG publisher's remote module installation repository which has been added to our list of autodetected repositories. The .conf file is here so you can see the value of the property-- which will change with appropriate text and link, once we receive the direct store link to the NA28 SWORD module in the DBG store. http://crosswire.org/ftpmirror/pub/sword/dbgraw/mods.d/na28.conf The cleanest way is up to you to popup a browser window in your frontend which will allow the user to navigate the purchase option in the store and receive the unlock key, and then to return the user back to your application to enter the unlock key, but you should be able to trust the UnlockInfo will include general text informing the user they can purchase an unlock key from the DGB, and that a link will be provided as part of that text (using our standard RTF + <a href> syntax we've used in .conf files for ages). Finally, if any frontend project manager wishes to test the actual NA28 module in your frontend, email me privately and I can generate a key for you. And if you'd like to add to your frontend the ECM integration to the INTF which you see in Bishop, you will find those webservices easily by having a look at the VerseStudy code here: https://git.crosswire.org/main/bishop/blob/master/www/js/versestudy.js (NB: methods, witnessStudy, variantGraph, alignmentTable, dECMApp) Praise God for this opportunity to make these valuable resources available to our users at the absolute lowest price. In Him, Troy _______________________________________________ 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
