e-Sword LIVE goes, um… Live!
I have a tee shirt that reads “I never finish anyth.” The caption is tongue-in-cheek, but as I often have several projects in the hopper at once it sometimes feels like the truth. e-Sword LIVE is a project that after a long incubation period has finally escaped into the wild.
I’ve had the privilege of working on e-Sword LIVE for about the last eighteen months. It’s a web application version of Rick Meyer’s e-Sword Bible software. The original e-Sword is a standalone Windows program that is by all accounts the most popular Bible study software in the world, with over 7 million downloads worldwide.
Rick wanted to create a version that could be used on the web by anyone and from anywhere. He headed up the project and I built the system from scratch using the MooTools javascript framework and the usual suspects PHP, MySQL and Smarty templates. There’s a wide variety of different Bibles, Commentaries, Dictionaries and other cross reference tools available, all tied together by some nice technology that makes it easy to use and navigate.
You can type in a reference like “John 3:16″ or search for words or phrases. If you want to link to a specific passage from your own site you can do so like this:
http://live.e-sword.net/app/?bibleref=1ki_19:11
Check it out here and let me know what you think.There’s a default Bible and Commentary, but lots more are available once you register.
Soon we’ll have it shortened and you’ll be able to omit the “/app” part of the URL. Oh wait… I guess that means it isn’t finished after all!
Climbing Flash Mountain
I consider myself a decently skilled Flash developer. However, I don’t use the program frequently enough to keep up with the constant pace of change in ActionScript. So it seems that every time I start with a significant Flash project I’m faced with the decision of either sticking with the backward-compatible language choices or forging ahead into uncharted territory and learning new skills. I’ve always been the type that wants to use what’s best—not necessarily what’s easiest—so I again find myself scaling a learning curve.
Adobe’s decision to rewrite AS from the ground up was a good one. A lot of the schizophrenic weirdness of AS2 seems to be gone, and AS3 is now a proper object-oriented language with all the standard features that are expected these days. Maybe now it’ll stabilize for a while…
So here I am once again surrounded by a stack of books. Poking, prodding and testing to see how things work under the new regime. It’s one thing to understand how to use a given feature or two. The trick is to grok (did I just say that?) what the best practices are and use the tools to the best advantage.
So no pretty pictures to share this time, unfortunately. Perhaps I can put together a little Flash gizmo to post here before long though… Until then, I’m clearing the desk to make room for more manuals.