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OpenSpritz Bible v2.0.0

ampers 2 Comments

This is a bit of a novelty app. The gimmick is that you can read quickly without having the ordeal of moving your eyes. In essence, a single word flys at you and your brain kinda absorbers the text.

This app had been broken for some time (maybe 3 years?) as the source where I was getting the Bible text went under. In the past, there was a bit of a Bible download management system where you could download and chose different versions and then the app would parse an XML file. With this update it is just using the ESV, essentially repeating code I used in the last update in the Inductive Bible Study app.

There are limited with the using the ESV, you can only pull down 500 verses at a time, whereas in the past you could read a whole book at once as all the content was downloaded locally. There ESV can let me download an XML of their Bible, but that will cost me about $100 a year. Due to the novelty of the app, not having a big audience and this app is free, I don’t think it is worth it.

Update has been pushed to the Play Store and this site. I’ve pretty much given up on Amazon as their app console process is painful.

Australian Daily Prayer v3.0.0

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For a little while, the Australian Daily Prayer app wouldn’t update the service content if you changed the date. The card at the top would display the right day and saint/festival, but the morning and evening tabs would still be displaying the current date. This bug turned out to be a relativity simple fix by changing the FragmentPagerAdapter to be FragmentStatePagerAdapter. However, I was already deep into readjusting the whole app to be running on the AndriodX libraries, which meant this fix got rolled up into a bigger update.

From the users perspective, not much will appear different (maybe the menu), but under the hood hopefully it will work smoother on newer phones (the last update was from October 2019).

There may be other bugs in regards to the content of this app, ie some days a Psalm doesn’t appear, or the readings might be a bit off, etc… That is more to do with the website it is pulling from, and not necessarily the app itself. I run that website, so the issue is still on me, but those content bugs may not have been fixed in this update.

Integration to the Inductive Bible Study app isn’t working, I think it may have to do with that app receiving requests from this app (which I probably forgot about it in the last major update). This may be a feature I will put back in.

You can get this update from the portfolio page and Play Store.

Inductive Bible Study v2.0.0

ampers 2 Comments

This is a long time coming, but I have finally updated the Inductive Bible Study app. A while back the bible API broke which means the app pretty much was useless. I looked into a few options to pull the Bible, but no free service really offered a major Bible translation, except for the ESV. So I am now only pulling the ESV text into this app.

I also tried updating this app to the newer coding standards. While the user will not really see any differences, I pretty much re-wrote this app to use fragments and not make each screen a new activity. This did take a bit of relearning, but they say it is better. Code is reused, but it did take me a little to get my head around each UI screen becoming a subpart of the main activity java class. Calling functions and knowing your code context was an initial hurdle. But I kinda got there in the end. There may still be some things I have forgotten. I did remember to update for the native android night mode

I have updated the play store, the portfolio page, and am trying again to use the Amazon dev console (we will see if it works in a few days).

Two Ways To Live – Dark theme

ampers 1 Comment

Last year when I posted the new update to Two Ways To Live the framework or skeleton that I used as a base had a section that made it work with the dark theme feature that comes with Andriod 10. I didn’t notice and hadn’t played with that before, and so when I pushed that update live it caused a few people massive reading issues as the app just wasn’t suited to be read in this mode.

I didn’t realise this was a problem till I saw that on the app store I received a few comments telling me about this issue.

I have now fixed up the dark theme section of the app so that it will work ok under the dark theme setting. This also means that my other recent updates to Who Will Be King? and mobile multiply will also need to be adjusted.

mobile multiply v3.0.0

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I started this update in November when I got a new wind of energy with the Two Ways To Live 2.0.0 update. This project took me much longer as I had to pretty much covert the whole Multiply book to be native in the strings.xml file. I then had to do it all over again for the Spanish version. It did, however, give me lots of time to listen to the T4G talks from 2020 while I was converting this app.

I have done a bit of testing on this, but there is a chance that there could be links broken, or starting or finishing letters to paragraphs missing, italics not in the original (especially in the Spanis) things like that. Please let me know if you do find any errors like this.

I am glad that this app is finally done before the year officially kicks off. I still use this app when meeting with senior high school kids. This will probably be my 7th year using it.

This new update is on the play store and this website – I’ve given up on Amazon as their review process is annoying.

Who Will Be King? 2.0.1

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Since I had done most of the leg work with the Two Ways To Live app, it didn’t take much work to port it to this app.

I did, however, forget to put a heading on the intro screen, but only noticed after I had uploaded it to the Google Play store. This meant I had to re-roll a new APK file and which had to have a higher version than the last. So the new version, with the new heading is now v.2.0.1. No one will get version 2.0

The new update is on the Google Play store as well as on this website.

Two Ways To Live 2.0

ampers 3 Comments

Last Thursday (my usual day off) I had two kids home sick which was a good thing as it meant they played with each other. It was also raining so I couldn’t do any outdoor jobs. So with my day off I set about updating the look and feel of my Two Ways To Live app. It took most of the day, to essentially rebuild it using the material design and newer androidx libraries. 

Hopefully what I have set up with this app, will mean I can now easily update Who Will Be King?, mobile multiply and maybe 3-2-1. I still would like to fix my Inductive Bible Study app, but maybe that will be for another rainy day.

The new APK is on the profile page of this site as well as in the play store. It may be a day or two before it goes on the Amazon app store as their platform is useless.

Australian Daily Prayer website fix

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Since around mid December, my web hoster has been transferring their free sites from cPanel to DirectAdmin. In this process, it meant that the Australian Daily Prayer website, and by extension the app as well, stopped working.

Once I was able to log back in there was some subdomain permission settings and SSL certs that needed to be set up. It seems to be going ok.

I think there is a display bug in the android app, in that it doesn’t deal with you selecting any old date, as it will display the same readings and prayers for whatever the current day is. (The website allow you to go to any date). I will try and find time to tweak this.

This move also broke my New City Catechism and multiply subdomains, but they too are back up and running again.

Australian Daily Prayer – https fix

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It seems that in my last update to get everything up to API 29, it caused an issue with the Australian Daily Prayer app. It turns out that from Android 9, by default http calls are blocked to encourage everyone to switch to https.

Now, after I released the previous update my Pixel 2 stopped working so while I am waiting for that to be fixed I am on my old Nexus 5, this is on Android 8. Still, today I tweaked the app, (assuming this was the issue), to make https calls to my dailyprayer website. Turns out I already had an SSL, so I didn’t have to tweak anything on the server, just the app.

I have already emailed all those who asked about the issue, and one person has gotten back to me saying it is now working on Android 9 from the Play Store. Hopefully, that is the new norm. APK on this site is also updated.