Thanks to the kindness of 492 of our closest friends, we were able to reach our goal of raising $50,000 for the development of an all-new version of PocketBible for Windows! The final total came to exactly $53,000.
If you contributed to the project, you’ll get an email from us letting you know how we’re going to keep you updated on our progress. We’ll publish updates here on the blog. Some will be public like this one; others will be for supporters only.
To get things started, I met yesterday with the outside developer responsible mainly for user experience to bring him up to speed. And since the beginning of the crowd-funding campaign I’ve been working with another in-house developer to bring her up to speed on the development tools and the initial tasks we need to work on.
Even though we already have two different Windows versions of PocketBible, this version is going to be implemented a whole new way (more about that later). So we have to treat it as if we’re doing it for a whole new platform. When we launch into PocketBible for a new platform, I like to tackle the hard things first. That is, I try to identify what is going to be a challenge for us and do some prototyping or proof-of-concept tests to make sure we’re going to be able to solve those problems before they become hinderances to the schedule.
What that means is that we’re going to start kind of in the middle of the project, focusing on the note editor and user data synchronization, because those seem to always present problems on every platform. We’ve already done some experimenting with simply displaying and scrolling through text, as that’s another problem area. We’ve actually written and thrown away a few different attempts at some of those problems already.
This approach creates interesting paradoxes. We’ll be able to sync your notes, highlights, bookmarks, and daily reading progress to and from the server before the program can create or display a note, highlight a verse, or set or go to a bookmark. We’ll be able to scroll through Bible text before we can choose and open a Bible to read. But such is the world of software development, especially with a mature product like PocketBible. Even though the new version of PocketBible for Windows doesn’t exist, PocketBible itself exists both as an abstract concept and in several concrete implementations — not just the existing Android, iOS, and Mac OS apps, but our soon-to-be extinct Windows apps and our already-extinct Windows Mobile Smartphone, Pocket PC, Handheld PC, Palm-size PC, webOS, Blackberry, Palm OS, and browser-based versions. So this new Windows version already exists in our heads. Starting in the middle or at the end or the beginning is all the same to us. 🙂
Photo by Danielle MacInnes on Unsplash
Congrats on meeting your fund raising goal. Looking forward to progess updates. Praying that God will direct you and the software developers and give you wisdom and insight on how and what to do.
May God bless the team’s endeavor.
Hooray!
When I travel I use a small touch screen, Win 10 8″ laptop to prepare talks on. Things I dream of having:
1. Have a dual/multi screen view of PocketBible. Would love to be able to scroll syncronized tablet and phone versions of Bibles while writing journal enteries on laptop.
2. I would love to be able to syncronise between laptop and Android tablet and or phone without the internet. (best option: wifi set one device as the server sync to others. Or good option: Save updates to an upload ready file that could be saved to and transfered to other devices to download)
When home I use my main computer open with multiple Bibles when preparing messages, I prefer the older windows 7 version when I am cutting and pasting to make a powerpoint each week.
Thanks for the update. Looking forward to seeing the changes.
Hallelujah! More “Good News!” from Laridian. May our Lord grant the development team wisdom, understanding and skill that you may continue to glorify His word. God bless.
Exciting news Craig! Out of interest, will it have feature parity with the other platforms?
PS Fun to think back to the days of Palm-sized PC :-).
Congrats…I still use the old version of the windows platform because of it’s feature set so I’m looking forward to getting an up to date version. Love that I can sync my phone, tablet and windows devices. Top of my enhancements include better search capability and…just dreaming now but the ability to apply multiple highlights to the same verse.
Congratulations on reaching your goal. Although I do not use the Windows version very often, I am pleased to see you and your team update it for those who use it consistently. I use the Android version daily on my tablet and couldn’t ask for more. Thank you.
Peace and grace,