Alkitab for Android Phone

Holy Bible in Indonesian is called "Alkitab". I am currently using Android Developer Phone 1 as my main phone, and I cannot find any "Alkitab" app yet on the market. I knew that Alkitab app exists for iPhone and J2ME platforms. Hence, I decided to develop one myself. Please keep in mind that the content of "Alkitab" is copyrighted by Lembaga Alkitab Indonesia (LAI).

You can download the apk file from here. For instruction on how to install .apk file into your Android phone, please go to this link. I am using Apps Installer from Android Market to install apk file from sdcard.

After application installation is done, please go here to download the database. You need the database to run the application. After you obtained "alkitab_db.zip", perform following steps:

1. Connect your phone to your PC using USB cable and mount the sdcard
2. Extract "alkitab_db.zip" to root folder of your sdcard. After extraction is done, you should see folder "alkitab_db" at your sdcard root folder
3. Unmount your sdcard by clicking "Turn Off USB Storage" on your phone
4. Start the application.
   

I will explain features available in this initial version.

Text Filter (on Android device with physical keyboard)

Type in the text using keyboard and the list will be filtered accordingly.

Gesture Motion

When you are in chapter or verse screen, you can swipe you finger on the screen to move between books/chapters. Swipe to left will bring you to the next book/chapter, swipe to the right will bring you to the previous book/chapter.

Search for Chapters/Verses

Clicking menu button will allow user to select this feature. This feature is used to search for chapters or versions in the bible, following are accepted input patterns:

• [book] [chapter], Mazmur 3
  
• [book] [chapter]:[verse], Matius 3:15
  
• [book] [chapter]:[start_verse]-[end_verse], Kisah Para Rasul 1:3-5
  
• [book] [start_chapter]:[start_verse]-[end_chapter]:[end_verse], Yohanes 10:5-11:3
  
• [book] [start_chapter]-[end_chapter], Lukas 5-10
• [book] [start_chapter]-[end_chapter]:[end_verse], Roma 3-5:13
  

Search For Word

If the search input does not match any of Search for Chapters/Verses patterns, the input will be used as keyword to search for match words in the bible. Searching using keyword feature will require the phone to send request to remote server instead of searching through local database. Local database is flat file database and it will take long time to find the match keyword. If you do not want the phone to connect to Internet, do not use the search for word feature.

That's it and I hope the app can be useful for everyone. Email me closari[at]gmail if you encounter bugs or have suggestions for improvement.

• Alkitab apk file (download here)
• Alkitab database file (download here)

Android 1.6 Image for Android Developer Phone

HTC finally released Android 1.6 image for Android Developer Phone, available here.

I have upgraded my phone and now it's running Donut.


I haven't check all the features yet. One thing I noticed is that the camera/camcorder app has new user interface and it's faster compare to previous versions.


I also noticed in Settings, Speech Synthesis is added as part of the Settings items. However, it lacks of Indonesian language. So far I have been using Eyes-Free for performing TTS on my application. Their packs include Indonesian as one of the available languages. I am not sure why Google did not include Indonesian in 1.6, since the TTS service in 1.6 is basically derived from Eyes-Free project.

That's it, I will start playing with new gesture recognition feature added in 1.6.

Android Developer

I found this in goodies section at android.com. It's pretty cool. It's almost one year now since I started writing applications for Android.