Jonathan Morgan wrote: > I don't want to get into a lengthy debate, but a full featured system > that is not used will not help anything. I, for one, will not use > Sword for Windows in its current state, and I think you can see in his > response to it how the average user will respond. [note that I have > considerable exposure to usability ideas, so I tend to view > goal-directed design and usability as more important than feature > lists.]
What makes BibleCS unusable for you? > How about BPBible? I'll willingly admit to bias here, but I claim > that it supports most features that ordinary users will actually use > (Install Manager style support is an exception, but that is currently > a work in progress), and does so in a way that I hope means users will > like it and use it. BPBible is admittedly not really on my radar. The fact that it relies on Python makes me assume it's going to have some similar feature lag to JSword-based software. (I have similar negative opinions of BibleCS based on its being written in BCB. I don't feel any Windows frontend can meet its potential without being written with MS tools.) In about 5 minutes of trying it out, here are my experiences. (And I'll grant I'm not a typical user. I know where Sword frontends are likely to fall short, and that's what I looked at first.) I'm using 0.2. Each verse number is a link. I don't know to what since the program crashes when I click them. I like the use of a treeview for module selection. But, it's a real pain to have all modules in one control, in one location. If I'm reading a commentary, I don't want to have to move my mouse all the way to the other side of the screen to switch to a different commentary. But I really do abhor the tabbed module selection that you find in BibleCS, e-Sword, and too many other programs. The treeview is not as nice for chapter selection, and apparently there's no way to select a commentary verse other than #1 without typing in the box. Mouseover popups and searching are both very nice and snappy. I like the copy all/anchor options on popups. The key selection in LD modules is nice. Loading the indexes will be slow on slower machines without some caching of the list. LD modules with UTF-8 keys are completely unusable. (UTF-8 keys themselves cannot be selected, lots of empty spaces in the list, non-UTF-8 keys can't be selected after attempting to select a key with UTF-8, etc.) No ICU transliteration. No GenBooks. No support for TEI. No support for #....|-style references in GBF modules. No special handling of daily devotionals or glossaries. Apparently there's no support to toggling anything but cross-refs, footnotes, and headings. (I can't find any way to display Strong's numbers, morphology, words of Christ in red (doesn't appear to render quotation marks either), textual variants, etc.) > I would have thought that e-Sword has more modules than we do. We have 279 public + 50 beta = 329 modules on crosswire.org (some overlap between the two, but it's minimal). I would estimate we will have about 60 more within 2 months--some of it actually useful. e-Sword offers 146 free native downloads + 6 STEP + 23 for purchase = 175 total available. I would guess the other Jonathan's "e-Sword has thousands more than The SWORD Project" anticipates the user's willingness to break the law by using the various programs for e-Sword that use scraping of BibleGateway, Gospelcom, etc. Aside from those, e-Sword does have a certain amount of nice ready-made user-created content available that I'd love to make available, but I either know or suspect that it is not legal to distribute (by us or them). --Chris _______________________________________________ sword-devel mailing list: [email protected] http://www.crosswire.org/mailman/listinfo/sword-devel Instructions to unsubscribe/change your settings at above page
