No, Allison and I are NOT expecting again! However, today (Sep 21) is Allison's birthday :-)
In mid-September, a colleague and I hosted a meeting in Dallas to preview a new desktop app, "nathanael", which is designed to help Digital Bible Library (DBL) users upload or download Bible content to/from the DBL.
Would anyone like to guess why I named this app "nathanael"?
I give thanks to God for answered prayers that our meeting went so well. There were over a dozen "power-users" and programmers representing different Bible agencies (like Wycliffe) or digital publishers (like YouVersion). We were all energized trying nathanael together and by all the technical discussions that arose. There were plenty of glitches we needed to work around, but that did not stop us from having a productive time together. We hope we can have meetings like this regularly!
My colleague Markconfirmed this when reporting back to our manager: "I feel like Eric and I have a much better idea about the users' priorities, and the users were visibly delighted to be involved in the process." Another person wrote to me and said, "Great to meet you and connect with everyone there. Very productive meetings!"
Since this meeting was in Dallas, Allison enjoyed the opportunity to visit with my colleagues during a dinner out. She and our kids also helped Mark's daughter Nathalie (who grew up in France) do some sightseeing in the area.
Nathanael still needs much work in months to come, but I wanted to share with you how valuable this meeting was in making a tool that better serves DBL users, and in doing so, helps reach more people with God's Word in every language. To that end please pray for nathanael.
Praise God that the Digital Bible Library recently reached a major milestone of hosting over 2000 Bible texts (representing nearly 1400languages)!
By the way, if you're interested in seeing a few of screenshots from nathanael (version 0.10.0 alpha) continue on.
The first demonstrates how to download a selection of resources from an audio Bible in DBL:
The second shows a list of DBL entries the user has authorization to work with:
Nathanael will also provide a better interface for editing the rich metadata that needs to be uploaded along with Bible content. That includes information like the name and abbreviation of the Bible. It also includes the media type and information like language and country, the copyright, etc. Here's a glimpse:
Serving together in Christ,
Eric👨, Allison👩, Sarah (5) 👧, Caleb (3) 👦 and Jonah (1) 👶
