If you’ve been keeping an eye on this site then you may have noticed a few changes over the last few days. Although most of the pages remain placeholders I’m slowly managing to expand the site theme across different sections. The archive pages now fit in with the rest of the site, which will probably make more of a difference once the site has been active for a while.
Meanwhile, what are the upcoming changes to the OfflineBible itself?
Since the last post I’ve done a lot of work around the installation process. The whole thing now runs in the background, so it no longer appears as though your browser has crashed when installing. I’ve also improved the error handling, so if there’s a problem you should get a pretty error page rather than a nasty script error window.
Over the next few weeks I’ll be working on the following areas:
- Package management
The ability to choose what packages you want to install. A package might be a Bible version, a lexicon, or perhaps a set of maps. When you’re online you may be offered any newly available package, or be prompted to upgrade to a more recent version. I’m also working on making the packages themselves smaller, as large packages increase the installation time. - Bible passage lookup
I’ve got code elsewhere that already does this quite efficiently, I just need to port it to JavaScript. The idea is that you will be able to type “1 Peter 5″ into the Search box and have 1 Peter chapter 5 loaded. It should also support more obscure references, such as “ez19″ (Ezekiel chapter 19), and “sos2″ (Song of Songs chapter 2). - Basic word searching
A few months ago I prototyped a database for really fast word lookups. As usual there’s a tradeoff between memory and processor usage, but I’m hopeful that I can migrate my prototype into the OfflineBible. In a worst-case scenario I might have to build some indexing into the installation process. - Strong’s concordance package
Once basic word searching is done the next thing I’ll want to search on is Strong’s numbers. Whilst I have some ideas about switching these to a more logical alternative (I really dislike the H/G prefixes, I’ll blog about this some other time though), I want to support the ability to search via these numbers. There isn’t much point in being able to search Strong’s unless I have the definitions in the OfflineBible, so I’ll need a lexicon package first. - IE6 and 7 support
Currently this site doesn’t render correctly in IE6 or 7, and I’d like to do something about that. It’s not particularly difficult to do this, it’s just irritating to have a site which works according to defined web standards, but which a particular browser decides to display like a jigsaw puzzle after a game of twister.
More news when I’ve actually done something (which is unlikely to be until the other side of the weekend).
Tags: news, OfflineBible News, roadmap