A site, and bibles in several languages
This site has just opened. It has one app to show, and that app is not out yet. So it is worth saying straight away what gets published here, what will be in it, and what comes next.
One publisher, one promise
MyAppsForEver publishes reading apps and nothing else. That is a deliberate constraint, and it is what settles every question of what to add — and, more often, what not to add. No feed, no account, no reading statistics: each time the question comes up, the answer is already written.
What carries from one app to the next is the tooling: the reading engine, the synchronisation of text and audio, offline downloads. What changes is the book.
What the first app contains
Bible Audio carries the Louis Segond translation in French: 66 books, 1,189 chapters, 31,102 verses. The text ships inside the app — it is there on first launch, with no network and no account.
The audio downloads chapter by chapter, or book by book, and then stays on the device. While it plays, the verse being read is highlighted and scrolls on its own. That is the least visible and longest piece of work in this project: for every chapter, the moment at which each of its verses begins had to be computed. Thirty-one thousand marks, produced and then checked by sampling.
There is no feed, no daily notification, no reading statistics. Bookmarks and notes stay on the phone.
The Louis Segond Bible in French, full text and audio reading, offline.
The other languages
The obvious next step is the same books in other languages. Part of that road is already built: the biblical texts I hold exist in English and in Spanish, in the same format as the French, and the reading engine has no idea which language it is displaying anyway.
What is missing is not the text but the voice. Each language needs a complete recording of all 1,189 chapters, then the same verse-by-verse alignment as the French. One translation does not break into the same units, nor move at the same pace, as another: the marks cannot be carried over, they have to be computed again.
So I am not giving a date, and I would rather announce a language once its audio is ready than the other way round. English will come first.
This site
It is deliberately small: a handful of pages, no downloaded fonts, no analytics script, no cookies — and therefore no banner to dismiss. It follows your device's light or dark setting, and the button at the top right forces one or the other.
The posts that follow will mostly be about how things are made: audio alignment, the weight of bundled content, layout trade-offs. If you have a question or a remark, the address is at the foot of every page.