Skip to content

It is finished

ampers Leave a comment

I have now finished my Bachelor of Theology, assuming I pass my last essays. Speaking of essays, I have just uploaded the one I wrote for this year (I did another pastoral care subject and since they contain personal information in them, I won’t be putting them online).

Now that I am finished, I hope I will be able to put some more time in to making and updating my android apps.

As of today this is where my apps stand:

app count

 

The total count is 14,423 apps currently on devices compared with 19,499 that have been downloaded. This means overall my apps have a retention rate of about 74%. (To be fair, some perform way better than others, so that stat is a bit inaccurate).

In the last week I have pushed out a minor update for OpenSpritz Bible (ESV has been removed and fixed a search bug) and I have started on a Spanish translation for the New City Catechism that hopefully will be out in a few weeks.

I have a long list of things I would like to make, add or improve… lets just see what happens.

Milestones updated

ampers Leave a comment

I have updated a few of the app pages with their new downloaded milestone counts for September. The new entries are:

321: 17th September 2014 – 200th download

mobile multiply: 14th September 2014 – 7,500th download

OpenSpritz Bible: 10th September 2014 – 100th download

Two Ways To Live: 17th September 2014 – 2,500th download

Thanks to all that have downloaded these apps.

I should probably point out that these stats are counting total  downloads (from the app store), not what is currently installed on people’s devices. OpenSpritz Bible is my worst app for retention with 70% of people uninstalling it.

Minor update for mobile multiply

ampers Leave a comment

Last night one of the pastors from Northwoods Community Church pointed out to me that in the mobile multiply app the chapter list in part 4 (the Old Testament) was incorrect. I have quickly pushed out an update to remedy this to the play store and to the app page on this site.

While I was editing the content of the pages, I also removed the download video links for leaders. While Vimeo does allow you to download their videos when you go to their page, the link they provide are generated on the fly and only work for a limited amount of time. So the links in the app, once worked for me for testing, but then they all broke when it was pushed to live.

The mobile site that I run for multiply still has the broken video download links, and it doesn’t have the weekly Bible readings. I think, since the official site is mobile friendly I may retire my mobile site.

3-2-1 app: Now in 8 languages

ampers 3 Comments

languagesThe 321 gospel presentation seems to be doing well, so well that it has been translated into at least 7 other languages. I have now updated the Android app to cater for these and fixed a few bugs with the videos so now they will download again. Below is a grid explaining what each language contains.

By default the app will pick up your phone’s default language, but you can change it withing the app if you want to try your hand at another.

Translation content

Language Video presentation Text presentation Localised images Course content Prayer & What’s next page
English ● ● ● ● ●
Chinese ● ● ●
French ● ● ●
Italian ● ●
Spanish Subtitled ●
Arabic ● ●
Czech ● ●
Turkish ● ●

If you do speak these languages, I would love some feed back about the content, to make sure that the interface text, about page and store listing text  is correct. I was really relying on Google Translate for some of it, which is always a bad idea. The presentation text I got from people who had translated the material, so that hopefully should be good.

The update will be appearing on the Google Play store soon and is also on this webiste.

Uni has started again, so I am going to slow down my Android development.

New App: OpenSpritz Bible

ampers 2 Comments

bible squarex512I have now pushed another app to the Google Play store. This app is probably the trickiest app I have made as it actually does something, ranter than just displays information.

A while back there was a bit of buzz about this Spritz reading technology that allowed you to read on a screen quickly. These guys were even going to let developers access their API, once you jumped through a few of their hoops and waited to be approved and when they were ready to let people have access. So I signed up for this. But, then I found that someone had read the concept and then coded up their own version and called it “OpenSpritz” (he said it took him 15mins to make) and then another guy ported it to android.

With this technology freely available right now I then thought I could make a Bible reading app. My original idea was that I would pull the verse text from the ESV API (which is what I do from the Australian Daily Prayer app), but I then found a bunch of Bibles in XML format. So I set out to use them.

In the process I also found a Bible passage parser, so that was worth using. It was in JavaScript and not Java, but I cheater and ran it through an internal webpage/WebView to use it. This may have been a bit over kill, but it seems to have worked.

I found that using the built-in XPath XML parser in android was really slow and so then found another Java module called VTD-XML which uses XPath requests, but is much faster. By way of comparison, I found with the standard XPath request for a single verse took about as much time as it did to pull all of Mark’s Gospel, so that was a big improvement. Still, if you request all of Psalms, it will take a little bit to process.

So as you can tell by now this app is a bunch of existing modules all strung together. Since those modules were opensource and free, I have also released the source code for this app for others to improve on.

It was only a bit later that I realised that I had read this blog post by Doug Wilson, which is him talking about the Spritz reading technology and using it to read the Bible. This means, I probably got the idea from him for this app, but only consciously decided to make it a few months later.

So head on over to the Play Store (when it gets updated), or the app page to download it (now).

New App: Communicate Jesus

ampers Leave a comment

logoA good mate of mine, Steve Kryger (@communic8jesus), runs the Communicate Jesus blog. In 2011 that blog just made it onto the top 200 Christian blogs, which is no small feat. At the moment, according to really only one source, Communicate Jesus is ranked 247th. It is even beating Ed Stetzer (he is at 261) and is only 4 places below The Briefing.

I once told Steve (a bit candidly) that if he updated his site to be responsive, then I would make him an app. While Communicate Jesus isn’t running a responsive theme, it is running a WordPress plugin called WPTouch that works as a mobile theme, depending on your device.

I initially thought the android WebView would act the same as a mobile device and WPTouch would recognise it and act accordingly. However I found that I had mixed results with the style coming down. To get around this the apps styles up the page once it has been downloaded, using a bunch of post JavaScript injections. This means the page kinda “pops” when it is loading, going from blank text to the pretty theme. It also means I can control the look a bit more. I have removed the change to the full theme button and the top webpage bar. The theme didn’t seem to have a search box, so I put that in the app as well.

So anyway, this has just been pushed to the Google Play store so it maybe a few hours before this link works, or you can head over to my own profile page and download the APK from there.

Two new android apps coming soon

ampers Leave a comment

I have my last two essays for this semester due on Friday, but since I am one of those students I submitted them early. This means I now have some free time… until next semester starts up again.

While I do hope to be spending more time with my family and catching up on things around the house and backyard, I will also be doing some more development work. In the pipeline I have two apps almost ready to be released. I also hope to get some (much needed) updates pushed out.

So stay tuned.