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Significant Partnership

September 28, 2017 by Leave a Comment

This article comes from our Newsletter which comes out 3-4 times per year.  Sign up to receive in your inbox!

Chris has been the technical lead and primary developer for the Scripture App Publishing Service. The initial rollout of the service utilized a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) strategy which provides just enough features to satisfy earlier customers and provides feedback for future development. The service has been running for about a year and they have gathered valuable feedback for what needs to be done in the next release.
They have also communicated with other partners who have similar needs. Two of these partners, Faith Comes By Hearing and International Mission Board(IMB), have stepped forward to help with the future development of the service. IMB has a team in Bulgaria who they employ to fulfill different IT needs. Chris has been tasked to design the expansion of the Scripture App Publishing Service and train the IMB team to do the development. He will be traveling to Bulgaria to do the training sometime this fall. Please pray for wisdom for Chris to know how to design the system so that it can be effectively implemented by the Bulgarian team and be flexible for the diverse needs of many organizations.

Faith Comes By Hearing
IMB
Filed Under: Language Software, Missions

Searching for Significance

September 27, 2017 by Leave a Comment

This article comes from our Newsletter which comes out 3-4 times per year.  Sign up to receive in your inbox!

We’re excited to announce that Wycliffe’s most recent devotional, “Searching for Significance”, is now available as a 10-day reading plan on YouVersion! “Searching for Significance” focuses on the search for something more in our lives — whether you call it significance, purpose, or meaning. There’s an innate desire in each of us for our life to matter, and this devotional explores that desire from a biblical perspective as we dive into God’s view of our worth. You can explore more stories and videos about this topic at wycliffe.org/significance. We encourage you to read the plan on YouVersion and share it with your family and friends. It’s an easy way to engage them in a conversation about God’s view of our significance and worth, while also sharing opportunities for them to engage with Wycliffe. Start the 10-day plan today!

Filed Under: Missions

New Open Doors

March 21, 2017 by Leave a Comment

This article comes from our Newsletter which comes out 3-4 times per year.  Sign up to receive in your inbox!

Partnerships are very important for the spread of the Gospel.  We are grateful that Chris can focus on developing software that accelerates Bible Translation and distribution.  Recently, his organization partnered with Faith Comes by Hearing (FCBH) and Renew Outreach to make changes to Scripture App Builder that will allow them to open new doors to distribute Bible apps with text and audio to minority language communities.
FCBH has Bible recordings in 1,066 languages.  They distribute these recordings using the Bible.is app for Android and iOS devices (and others). This requires that the user install the app from an app store.  Due to licensing restrictions, the audio has to be streamed over the internet.  This is a huge barrier (and in some cases dangerous) to many minority language communities.  Renew Outreach works with FCBH to distribute the audio on lockable Micro SD cards and Wifi hotspots (LightStream) to be used in audio players and feature phones.

With the changes made to Scripture App Builder (we are collecting usage data and transmitting when the user is on-line), now FCBH and Renew Outreach will be able to create apps with the audio and text bundled into the app and distribute the app virally.

“Everyone is VERY excited about using these apps. I met one new friend in particular who runs a ministry in a restricted country. He’s very well networked in his nation, knows approximately 80% of the believers, of whom there are few. Thanks to this app, now they will all be able to get Bibles safely because it’s illegal to distribute Bibles otherwise and easy to get caught with print ones. … These are the kind of folks who will now be able to get Bibles in their language for the first time, unhindered by outside forces.  Praise God and thanks for your hard work on SAB!”
— Brandon Honselek, Vice President/COO, Renew Outreach

Filed Under: Language Software, Mobile

New Software, Come and Get it!

March 21, 2017 by Leave a Comment

This article comes from our Newsletter which comes out 3-4 times per year.  Sign up to receive in your inbox!

Chris has been working with colleagues on porting Scripture App Builder to macOS for the past couple of years. This program allows users to create Bible apps specific to a minority language that include synchronized text and audio that are easy to distribute. Best of all, the user can do this with no programming necessary. Before, users on Windows and Linux computers could only create Android apps. Now users of Mac computers can create both Android and iOS apps. We are very excited to announce the first release of Scripture App Builder for Mac!

“For the past two or three years, Bible translation teams around the world have been enthusiastically building customized Android apps to make the translated Scriptures available in both text and audio. But we kept getting asked, “So, when can we build apps for the iPhone as well so that more people in our region can get access to God’s Word in their language?” Now the waiting is over: Scripture App Builder for Mac has now been released – and translation teams can go ahead and build both Android and iOS apps. Thank you so much to David and Chris for all their hard work to make this possible!” (Richard Margetts, SIL Francophone Africa)

Scripture App Builder 3.3 for Mac / iOS

Filed Under: Language Software, Mobile