I've been working on the Youversion Bible app

I can now decloak and reveal that the work I've been doing on BB10 was on the Blackberry version of the Youversion Bible app for the BB10 platform as recently announced by Youversion. My part has only been small, as I've only done it in some of my lunchbreaks. Another developer has done most of the work.

Update: Oct 28, 2013 it's now released http://appworld.blackberry.com/webstore/content/1222/?countrycode=GB&lang=en

The Youversion people are really committed to cross platform apps. Look at the list of platforms on their app page. Not many people can say their app works on HP/Palm or Symbian!

Medium

I, along with probably many other people, got an invite to write an article for Medium, the new place where the cools kids hang out. Well, the cool writers anyway. I had something in mind already so I just published How to pace your holiday well.I could have probably spent more time polishing it, but I wanted to get it out there while I've still got more free time than usual.

I don't want this to become a link blog, but here are some thoughts on Medium from Tim Bray, who puts things better than me. Also, a good discussion on Hacker News. Finally, for completeness, a link to the article on my own, non-techie, blog: How to pace your holiday well, put there because I can post my content on my own blog should I want.

Bible translation and copyright

Disclosure - I work for Wycliffe Bible Translators in the UK and we second people to other organisations to work on Bible Translation. I don't do translation, but I work in IT. I don't speak for Wycliffe Bible Translators UK.

I've had a draft post on copyright and the Bible sat around for ages, and today I came across this post by Michael Johnson, Bible Copyright vs. the Church, which describes many of the issues, and does it a whole lot better than I could. I'm not sure I agree with everything he says, but I do with most of it. So I suggest you read it.

I won't discuss the issue of making money, but there is also an issue about quality of translation. If a group of people put a lot of effort into a translation and then relinquish copyright and make it available digitally then someone else could take their translation, change the bits they don't like and republish it under the same name of the original translation. They may produce a "worse" translation, but someone's standards. Then there are two versions of this Bible. If the worse translation gets a lot of coverage people may blame the original group of translators for producing a bad translation, whereas they've done nothing wrong. 
Creative Commons may give ways of making the Bible available, whilst making sure it doesn't get changed, so those who actually publish copyright bibles could consider this.

What got me started on the original article was this post on Google+, which I post without comment. 

Update: There is the Every Tribe Every Nation project which is working to get Bible texts distributed in digital form. So those who own the copyright aren't necessarily holding onto the texts but are releasing them for use. It involves Wycliffe, Biblica and the American Bible Society. Youversion are one of the consumers of the texts.

IT/Missions networking groups

I've been revising the list of links on the right of my blog. One (a mission tech wiki) is defunct and I've added two more. So I thought I'd write about the two new ones and a reminder about another one.

(Global) Community of Mission Information Workers "We work with information and we want to see that information bless the world and contribute to the growth of God’s Kingdom."

itconnect.info  "has been set up to connect Christian organizations providing Information Technology (IT) support to the field. It helps these organizations in providing IT Support to field entities who have:

• Limited IT Personnel
• Limited equipment
• Limited IT Infrastructure"

oscar.org.uk "If you're involved or interested in world mission or Christian work around the world, OSCAR is your gateway to useful information, advice and resources."

Kathy Sierra is back!

It is heartening that when threats against women are in the news that Kathy Sierra, who stopped writing her Creating Passionate Users blog after she received death threats, has started blogging again.

Open Software and Libre Office

A couple of Open-y related things:

Tim Bray on OSCON 2013

On the age thing, I bet if you drew a graph of people in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, and older, the 40s & 50s bars would be highest, but it’d be reasonably flat. One person I was talking to raised an explicit concern that we’re not replacing ourselves and are in danger of aging away.

There’s something in that; the first generation of OSS loudmouths is still by and large active, and quite a few of them, er us, end up on the stage at OSCON year after year. I’m not convinced though; there were plenty of fresh faces among the grizzled ones.

If the young people are not so prevalent (and that's not certain) is it a good or bad? Generally it would be bad, but are we approaching a solved problem? Not sure.

I also saw this from Michael Meeks:

Karl Fogel's experience http://t.co/E2ABIl1Kwi with LibreOffice is encouraging :-)
— Michael Meeks (@michael_meeks) July 29, 2013

So I followed links and saw that LibreOffice is up to 4.1 now. A few years ago I had the intention of making suggestions to improve the Calc software so that it was more like Excel. I was particularly interested in the AutoFilter function, which fell short of what Excel was offering at the time. I can't remember the details, but I remember it requiring quite a lot of time to clearly specify what was needed, when all I wanted to say was "make AutoFilter work like it does on Excel". So I didn't make any suggestions. Since then Office 2007 and later versions have come out and the autofilter function has changed again. I'm pleased to say though that with version 4.1 Autofilter seems to have caught up with Excel 2007 at least.

On the downside though, the database ("Base") is not an Access killer yet. It does offer four different programming languages though.

I opened a document I have been recently working on and was pleased to see that the column layout was preserved well, which has been a problem in the past. It also had photos which were rotated and had dropped shadows (yes, I know, so 2010) and they were not rotated in Writer and the shadow was solid black.

In case it seems like I've got a bit of a downer on Open Source and LibreOffice in particular, let me say I'm very pleased with the way it (a version of OpenOffice before the split in fact) enabled me to create a good report writing setup which took in XML and produced RTF at the end. Also, the Graphite support means that Bibles can be worked on in many complex scripts. Also, for those who can't afford a full legal copy of Office, it's a good alternative.

Our loss is Computers 4 Africa's gain

You can find them at www.computers4africa.org.uk.