Devotion feature details (0.9)

One of the most requested feature is the ability to display Devotion (in Indonesian it is called "Renungan" or sometimes bahan saat teduh). So many people requested that so I was very much encouraged to add this feature.

This feature is different from other features, in that this requires external support in order to make this work. We need a live web server to handle the request of devotional material, because the material itself changes every day, we cannot store it onto the program.

I decided to support two devotional material, which is Renungan Harian (Indonesian version of Our Daily Bread of RBC Ministries), and Santapan Harian (literally: daily nourishment, of Pancar Pijar Alkitab).

They can be summarized as follows according to my experience:

• Renungan Harian is focused on showing how to relate daily events with the Scriptures. The Scripture passage is selected in order to give some message about the daily events.
• Santapan Harian is focused on giving exposition of every chapter on the Bible, sequentially with jumps every few weeks. After exposition, the implications to our daily life is given.

Both can suit readers, although I think the latter is for later stages of Christian spirituality growth.

Like the links above indicate, they are provided by my favorite sabda.org website. I afraid that if there are more and more users use the Bible app, sabda.org will suffer. So I made some kind of proxy cache in my server at kejut.com.

Santapan Harian devotion material

The verse address that is displayed on top of the devotion is clickable to directly jump to the verse.

How if there is no Internet connection when one wants to read the devotion? Every time a material is downloaded, it is checked, whether it is valid or not (because sabda.org only has materials until a specific date in the future), then if it is, will be stored into the local database. When the devotion screen is opened, materials up to 14 days to the future will be downloaded and stored.

When I read the feedbacks, there are many users that are happy with this, and also quite a number users who had problems... however it's because the proxy cache server is not storing the materials with the correct encoding to the cache database, and it is fixed now!