The very first alpha version of the new Bible Reader software is now available for testing! Remember it’s not complete, so don’t expect everything to work as it should. You will be able to browse the books of the Bible though. Find out more

In fact, initial tests were made over a year ago, but I was not able to commit the time to continue development. Now, I’m back on to it, with renewed energy to see it through.

Bible Reader Free, up to release 0.99, has been developed in REALBasic, which is a very good rapid application development environment. Unfortunately, the version that was avialable at the time did not make it easy to provide some of the more standard Mac OS X features that people have come to expect. A lot of jumping through hoops went on to try to mimic standard OS X operability. In the end, I tired of fighting and had been thinking for a long time of moving to Cocoa, using Objective-C, along with Xcode, to continue the development.

Starting up in Cocoa meant a reasonably steep learning curve, though I am familiar with C. I guess it was the thought of having to dig in and start again. But I knew the benefits would be much greater once I passed that first set of hurdles.

Right now, I have an early version of Bible Reader running in Cocoa, using the same Books folder that 0.99 uses. Providing this application is placed in the same folder as 0.99, it picks up the available translations and provides them within the program.

Straight off, it’s much quicker navigating between chapters. Clicking the next button at the bottom brings up the next chapter almost instantly. This is probably a combination of Cocoa and some better coding techniques used since 0.99 was written

Other than general browsing of the bible texts, there are no other features currently working. Except for a live word match feature, where a word is typed into a field and it’s highlighted wherever it occurs in the text. That’s quite useful, but really only a test feature for better things to come!

I’m studying the documentation for SearchKit, which is a Carbon framework for searching documents and text. This works with indexes, which is how any good search mechanism should operate. Once I’ve deciphered the code, this should give Bible Reader a search that can find disparate words, a la Google et al. Now that would be a useful search system!