What I want a Bible reader to be.
I have three basic use cases that I want my Bible reader to serve.
Looking up references on my phone during worship, or arguing with people on the internet on my desktop, I want to get to the verse quickly without faffing about.
Chapter breaks really kill the flow when reading a book. Beyond that, intrusive chapter and verse numbers are annoying, and non-canonical headers offend me.
Bookmarks that I can move forward to my current position help me keep track of daily reading.
When I'm not quite sure about an English translation, I want to look at the original words used. I don't know Hebrew or Greek, so I want to see the words in a verse with their Strong's number/definition.
This should be easy to do without breaking the flow of reading.
- Uninterrupted reading
- Unobtrusive/hidden chapter/verse markers
- No chapter breaks, scroll through the whole book
- No non-canon headings
- Simple navigation
- Select the book to open it
- Optionally get scrolled directly to a chapter
- Keyboard shortcut to type in a reference and navigate to it
- Programmatic link friendly
- An easy, documented way for other sites to generate a link to a book/chapter/verse
- Fast
- Text should all be pre-downloaded
- Opening a new book should take <50ms, including render time.
- No loading spinners
- Study-friendly
- Display original Hebrew/Greek while reading, with Strong's definitions
- Bookmarks
- Actual bookmarks that you can move forward based on how much you read today, not the "page tags" that most apps call bookmarks
- Crossreferences
- Source from OpenBible.info's crossreference database
Allowing users to choose between different translations will not be a priority.
Zondervan and their ilk use the threat of ungodly copyright enforcement to coerce people into paying them to use more than a small portion of most popular translations of the Bible.
I am not interested in paying for their licensing.
Nor am I interested in reverting to archaic pre-copyright translations.
I will use the World English Bible translation. It's a good, freely licensed ASV fork.
This fork of Pickering's translation of Revelation will be used for Revelation.
To build and run the app, you will need to install Node.js.
Fork this repository and clone the fork to your machine.
npm install
npm run devYou can then open http://127.0.0.1:8888 in your browser.
The app will re-build automatically when you save your changes, but you'll have to reload the web page yourself.
To run the tests:
npm test