I should introduce myself: my name is Nathan Kitchen (26/M/UK). For the past few months I’ve been working on a Bible website with a difference: unlike other Bible websites, you can actually use it without an Internet connection.
All of this is made possible using Google’s Gears plugin, which provides storage for the contents of the Bible on your computer. If you want to try out the OfflineBible, install the Gears plugin and then visit my.offlinebible.com.
So, why have I made this?
Often when listening to an exhortation, exposition, or study I find myself wanting to look deeper into something. Perhaps I want to find another occurence of a phrase, or see where else a Bible character is mentioned. There are three ways I could do this:
- Carry around a large pile of heavy books
- Look up the information on the Internet from a laptop or phone
- Download Bible software (e.g. the excellent e-Sword) onto a laptop
Carrying around a small library is not very practical, as the books will invariably get dog-eared and fall apart. Also, it takes a long time to physically look up a word in an dictionary or concordance. By the time I’ve found a word, the speaker is bound to be talking about something entirely different and I’ll have missed his point. Finally, I don’t want to carry heavy books.
Looking up information on the Internet is a great idea when an Internet connection is available. Unfortunately, not many places of worship have an access point. 3G is always a possibility, but it’s quite expensive (at least in the UK) and not exactly lightning-quick.
Finally, you can download something like e-Sword, or an open-source Bible, and run it on your laptop. There’s nothing wrong with that solution. It’s fast and reliable. However, I personally find them a little hard to use with a touchpad/keyboard, and the way they are laid out is not particularly conjucive to following the many verse references in a typical Bible talk. I find e-Sword particularly good for personal study, but quite unweildy at Bible class.
Back in January I found myself reading about Google’s new Gears plugin at work. Once I realised what it did, I decided to use it to build a simple Bible application. Eventually I built this site around it, which I intend to use to keep people appraised of development (and get some feedback).
Currently the OfflineBible has a few rough edges that I intend to slowly chip away over the coming weeks. If you’d like to try it out, please follow the installation instructions. You can leave feedback in the comments to any blog post.
Meanwhile, I’ve got some rough edges to chisel.