First update of published app (0.5)

Here is the first update to the published Bible application.

We don't need the chapter address on the title bar. Instead, I moved it to the bottom, to the button that allows you to move to different parts of the Bible.

Main interface

Simple setting screen. You can change the size of font (just a 7-item selection list), the font (serif/sans/monospace) and to bold the font.

Setting screen

I really want to get some feedback of the program, hence I popup this message every time the program is opened. I got quite a lot of feedbacks which encourage me to develop it more and more.

Feedback popup

The first version and this version lasts for 2+ months in Android Market, getting 252 downloads, so in average there are 4 downloads per day. I am very happy with this ^^

Time to Publish! (0.4)

After some more development as I am more accustomed to Android development, many bugs are fixed, and the Bible software are finally usable and for the public! I need to pay Google USD 25 for publishing, but I think that's acceptable compared to Apple's USD 99 fee for new developers.

The slowness of the previous version happens to be the use of java.util.Scanner that reads the information about index of chapters and number of verses of each Bible book. Although the class performs fast on desktops, on Android device without a JIT it suffers a lot. I modified that book information to use binary instead of textual numbers and prevent using java.util.Scanner altogether. The result: book information are read in less than a second, and it is even faster on my friend's HTC Hero.

A conclusion: always be reminded that (Android, non-JIT, non-optimized JVM implementation) devices are much slower than desktops.

Another thing I learned is that Android emulator is much slower than real devices. That's a good thing, in a way ^^

Main interface. It now has a prev/next chapter button on the bottom.

Now the Go To screen also has the book selection drop-down. It was painful to select the book and the chapter:verse separately.

There is this "warning" message when the program is opened. It says:

This program is unfinished, there are many defects and items that are not completed. I am putting this into Android market because I think there are people who needs Alkitab (Indonesian Bible) on Android handsets. Please make sure you update this program when a new version is available! Please send messages, suggestions, encouragements, and ideas to (my email). OK?

When "No!" is clicked, the program closes ^^

Bible Text is Shown (0.2)

Finally we have some Bible text displayed on screen. The text was taken from bibledatabase.org site, where unformatted (plain-text) Bible data are available for download.

Bible text of Genesis 1

The controls are very limited: left and right buttons to change chapters; select menu -> Book to change the book, and select menu -> Go To to change the chapter and verse number.

What was interesting about the text display is that it is a single TextView, with some formatting using the setSpan calls on a SpannedStringBuilder object. Actually I wanted to have the verses appear not in a new line every verse, but continually to the right of the previous verse. However, on some chapters, the text entirely disappears! After some frustation, it is that the TextView cannot handle a very long line.

Start-up time is very long, why...? It takes about 5 seconds on the emulator (I do not have any Android device).

Anyway, this is when I select menu -> Book to select the book to display:

Book selector. The number is the chapters available.