Show HN: I am developing Bolls Bible A free and open soure app | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I am developing Bolls Bible A free and open soure app

bolls.life

1 pointbohuslav8 comments

FYI -- I tried it in Hebrew and its weird. Hebrew is read right-to-left, and the _words_ in your sentences appear correctly, but the _sentences_ are in the wrong order.

at https://bolls.life/WLC/1/1/ -- the beginning of the second sentence is at the right (beginning) of the first line.

Yeah. I need to do something with rtl.

Now lets talk about real problems.

I believe in God and I love to read the Bible. I was reading paper Bible. Then switched to digital Bible. Using a Bible app from YouVersion I found a few places with textual errors, where even entire pieces of text were lost , I was aware about the app, afraid to use it anymore. I submitted textual errors to their support, but no fixes. And even was working at their support for a year or so, and saw how they are unable to fix those errors just because of being bound to publishers. The publishers don't respond for years so that the text errors are remaining till now and nobody took responsibility to fix them to provide clean God's Word to people. But they aren't even fixing translations from public domain!!!

Here is another nuance. On their home page, they claim so many times that their app is free. And guess how many tracking scripts they are using across their app? At least four scripts from different companies! What are they doing with all your data? Probably they share it with their "partners" to improve the app UI. Sure!

Similar situation exist with many other Bible apps. Tracking, shameless pervert ads during your reading. And they spare to spend their time to make their apps better! Closed source. Tracking. Ads. No synchronization. No cross-platform availability. Bad UI. Here I have many reasons to write my own app.

And I am making https://bolls.life. Cross-platform, no tracking, truly free, open sourced, no ads, I even provide some APIs for you guys! I try all my best to provide Bible translations in perfect quality. This is a second year sines I am making it. Hundreds of peoples around the world are already using it daily and appreciate it. I can freely say that I am proud of this software! So many efforts was spent just to be able to daily read the Bible in a clean UI. I hope you guys will enjoy it. Have a nice time )

Nice looking UI.

Thanks. I put a lot of efforts in it :)

How are you handling managing the licensing for the different translations? I see you have some licensed ones like NIV and ESV so you are not just using public domain texts.

I see there are Hebrew and Greek texts - these are source texts for study and not modern translations, right?

It seems like it would be so cool if there where more modern translation efforts with the source texts and translations managed like open sourced licensing.

Something like what I understand the WEB project did on a small scale, but a bit more ambitious with the source materials included - suitably licensed somehow.

I prefer to use only translation from public domain, but sometimes users ask for proprietary translations. I can't imagine being in court with publishers. Shame on them.

I like WEB. It is a good translation. I wish more projects like that.

There are, usually, links to translations info. I don't use modern Greek and Hebrew translations yet. Only old. But you may request some.

Github repo: https://github.com/Bohooslav/bain/

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