As with any
software, the design philosophy determines where the product has its
major strengths. With BibleDatabase, this is in the following areas:
It is all very well
to have an enormously powerful piece of software but
"driving" it requires numerous button clicks to get even
the simplest of tasks done. This is both time consuming as well as
tedious. Excepting for functions such as Find and Find Again -
things which mandate another pop-up form - everything you need to do
or can do on a form is done right there on the form in front of you.
Few things are more irritating than having a new form jump up at you
each time you want to change some simple setting. The BibleDatabase
interface is simple and uncluttered and has been designed around
this concept of simplicity. At it's simplest level, from the main
form just type in the word or phrase you are looking for and hit the
go button!
Because
BibleDatabase was written with comparing texts on a verse by verse
(or chapter by chapter) basis from different texts in mind, special
attention was given to the speed at which it does this. We have
tested BibleDatabase on a 1 GHz Pentium PC with 55 Bibles and it can
fetch and display all the verses from any Chapter in any Book from
all 55 Bibles in under 1 second. That's fast! It is further to be
noted that no Bible is loaded to memory at any time during the
process. This is important as performance is not dependant on the amount
of RAM on any given machine.
Although we
recommend 32 MB of RAM, BibleDatabase will run on a 486 class
computer with as little as 4 MB RAM. Said differently, BibleDatabase
uses system resources very sparingly allowing you to run it
simultaneously with a number of other Applications without bringing
your PC down to a crawl.
Searching any one
book of the Bible is almost instantaneous due to the Bible indexing
method used. This is also important because it means searches will
complete in a reasonable time even on very old machines while being
lightning fast on modern PC's
We have tried to
keep the BibleDatabase screens as free as possible from unnecessary
"clutter". We felt it important to make as much screen
"real estate" available for the actual text without
filling it up with buttons and menus. Besides the main menu and
toolbar the only thing one should see on the screen is the thing you
really want to see - The Bible.
Most people -
particularly in third world countries - connect to the Internet by
way of Dial-up modems. Often at speeds of 56K or less. In many
countries Internet connections are unstable to say the least, making
the downloading of files larger than about 5 MB almost
impossible. The BibleDatabase software is presently around 4.5
MB (including the runtime files!) and the Bibles around 1.1 MB each. For a Bible one Megabyte is
tiny by comparison to most other Bible software available on the
Internet. Most are around the 2.5 MB mark with some as large as 4
MB! Further, In many countries people pay per minute whilst
connected to their ISP so download time becomes a big issue.
A Bible smaller
than 1.44 M can fit on a floppy disk and therefore be distributed.
This is particularly relevant in countries where Christianity is not
welcome and Christians have to work underground. For example, those
who don't have Internet access can easily download a Bible to a
floppy disk at an Internet Cafe.
Probably the
biggest difference in size is the size of the installed file on the
end user PC. A complete BibleDatabase Bible only requires 4.3 MB of
hard drive space once installed. The same Bible takes a whopping 10
MB of space if it is stored as a .MDB (Microsoft Jet Database) file
- which is the way it is normally stored. Ten megs may
not sound like much if you only have one or two Bibles installed.
However, if you install 50 modules it fast exceeds the size of most
other Applications including Windows itself!
Once installed,
BibleDatabase modules are stored as plain text files
on your local hard drive. This means a couple of things. First and foremost
it means you can read and display the files without the
BibleDatabase software if you have to. When you search for something
the search results are also stored in plain text files (in fact,
except for the BibleDatabase software itself all files are in plain
text format) - text files are a universal format. You can
display them in a DOS or Windows machine, a MAC or a PC, a UNIX or a
SUN system; you can email them, copy from them, use them in other
applications - whatever you like. You cannot do this if a
file is a formatted binary file. A formatted binary file can only
be used with the software it was designed to be used with. (Many
people have used the BibleDatabase modules for purposes other than
with the BibleDatabase software - if it furthers God's Kingdom we welcome
it!)
Many potential
users of BibleDatabase have very little in the way of Computer
experience. We moved from the premise that a Minister or Pastor is
generally more concerned with being a Pastor than he is with being a
computer expert. Knowing how to defeat the anti piracy headers used
in the latest MP3 format is not really the concern of the average
Housewife or Bank Clerk. And so it should be! Consequently we have
tried to make the user interface as straightforward as possible,
without having all the "bells and whistles". Having said
that however, BibleDatabase has many features which are both
powerful and complex in order to satisfy even the seasoned PC user.
This
goes almost without saying! Have you ever wondered how much money
one can make from selling Bibles on a website like this? We did the
following calculation. Lets say we were selling BibleDatabase at
$29.00 (seems to be a popular price). Cheap you say? Now lets say we
sell one thousand copies per day (by the way, we actually do more
than that). Doesn't take a Rocket Scientist to figure out that
equates to $27, 000 a day! 1TIM 5:18 says "...The worker
deserves his wages." However, the Word
also says in MT 10:8 "Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse
those who have leprosy, drive out demons. Freely you have received,
freely give" - We believe the Word of God was freely given to
us so we freely give it to you.
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