Go Bible at CrossWire - a call for volunteers

The CrossWire Bible Society is adopting Go Bible as one of its open-source software applications and development projects.

Now that there a link to Go Bible project from the CrossWire applications page , I would like to issue a call for volunteers for experienced Java programmers to help in taking the development project forward. There is more to do than any single one of us can manage, given all the other calls on our time and resources.

Please visit my CrossWire Developers wiki page and volunteer to take on some of the tasks listed. By all means add further tasks, as and when you identify a requirement. If you have suggestions, discuss them in my Talk page, and/or send to the relevant CrossWire mailing list.

You will find it helpful to join the Go Bible Forum, Go Bible Google group, and Go Bible Dev Google group, and Google code pages for Go Bible, as and when appropriate. You can find all the relevant links in the side panel of this blog.

Please keep me in the loop.

Kitaabka Quduuska Ah

Kitaabka Quduuska Ah is the name of the Somali Bible. This is now officially available to download free of charge as a Java cellphone application from Nolosha Cusub. Please pray that people from both Somalia and Somaliland will discover this and find it a comfort and a blessing in these troubled times. Remember too the many Somalis who are living abroad as refugees from the conflicts in the Horn of Africa.

Farsi Go Bible

Producing GoBibles as such is not the total focus for me, but producing material for Iranian churches is. And GoBible fits perfectly.

Thanks to David for bringing me into the fold.

Thanks to Magdi for his successful work on the Arabic Bible which kept me going when I did not get the Farsi version right.

Go Bible and many success stories.

Really I am proud to be a member in the Go Bible Team and to contact such a man like Jolon who create a very handy useful application to read "The Holy Bible" on your Mobile phone, and if you think for a while you will see that you never forget your mobile, it is always in your hands or in your pocket. so it is so easy in your spare time to pick your mobile, launch the GoBible application and start read, and may God Bless you.

Also many thanks to David who spent alot of time in converting different formats of bibles, creating alot of translations, and porting them to Go Bible, he also shares his experience in a great way as it seems moment by moment on the Go Bible Forum.

oh, long introduction but they well deserve this.
The first time I come across Go Bible was in June 2006, I was in need of an Arabic Bible on my Mobile phone (Nokia 6630) and I discovered this application after installing many Symbian application that halted my phone!!!

There was some problems in the Arabic version simply defined in reversed words that appearing on Nokia Series 60 phones in some chapters, I contacted Jolon first to report these bugs, but I have no answer, he receives alot of emails, so be patient, then I decided to fix these bugs.
I contacted jolon again and he said to me that there are many users of Arabic GoBible reported these bugs, but no one comes up with a solution.

After some trials in the wrong way to reverse the characters of words of these chapters by a perl script. I wondered if I can find the reason of the reversed words that appearing not only healing by a hard coding fix. and I succeeded, I discovered a 3 byte character in the source text file which was causing the problem. I have removed the 3 byte character which occurred 5452 times.

This problem was appeared only on Nokia Series 60 phones not in Sony Ericson, because Nokia can render this 3 byte character while Sony Ericsson can't.

I emailed Jolon again with this fix in addition to other important fixes:

• Translated the new user interface keywords into Arabic.
• Added the first verse to John 3 which was missing.
• Added a missing verse to 1 Timothy.

and this fix published on Friday 25 August 2006

Thanks God.

Share us with your success stories with Go Bible, this will encourage many people to do so, and spread the Word of God to all nations.

http://arabic.gobible.googlepages.com/

God Bless you

Welcome to the Go Bible Team

Go Bible was launched four and half years ago by Jolon Faichney in Queensland, Australia. He began programming version 1.0 in August 2003. Since then it has progressed in leaps and bounds. The current version 2.2.6 is now available from the main Go Bible website.

I first came across Go Bible just over a year ago, in March 2007, shortly after being given a Sony Ericsson K750i mobile phone as a belated Christmas gift from my wife and children. One of the first things I did was to search the internet looking for free Bible software for mobiles. The moment I installed the King James Version of the whole Bible, I was seriously impressed by the quality, functionality, speed and ease of use of the Go Bible application.

When I found that Jolon had also made a developer kit called Go Bible Creator, my curiosity was heightened even further. It wasn't long before I too was having a go at making a Go Bible version for an existing Bible translation, namely the Albanian Bible, using the ThML file from CCEL downloaded using ThML Reader.

Since then I have spent many happy hours working on porting various Bible versions and translations to the Java ME mobile phone platform, and researching all sorts of topics related to Bibles, copyrights, mobile phones, Unicode, file formats, conversion software, editors, XML, languages, scripts, fonts, glyphs, ligatures, punctuation, etc. The list keeps growing. Much of the knowledge gained along the way has been posted as topics in the Go Bible Forum.

The idea of starting this team blog is quite recent. It is intended as a means to share our vision for using mobile phones to bring the Word of God to more and more people throughout every nation, and thereby help to fulfil the Great Commission of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

The aim is for this blog to be more about people, relationships and ideas than merely a focus on the technology involved. Free and accessible Bible software can only go so far to help build the Kingdom of God. It is hoped that being a team blog, it will not end up being a monologue written by just one team member. Moreover, the team itself is not exclusive! If you are already involved as a user of Go Bible Creator, or even as a software developer contributing to improving Go Bible source code, then we'd like to hear from you. If you share the same aims, then join the team, and help spread the vision.