Legalities of creating a JavaME Equivalent to YanceyWare

[carljokl]

It looks like the agreement has been basically accepted. There might still be some details to clarify. I may not start developing this project in earnest until I finish my Sun Certified Java Developer assignment and it has been submitted for marking. The bulk of the work is done on this assignment but I have some finishing touches and documentation to do for it before it is ready to be submitted. I have wanted it to be finished long before now but the Church is very good at having lots of meetings, activities and assignments which squeeze whatever out of work time you have such that I am not getting as much time to work on my assignment as I would like (I am sure many of you know the feeling). I really want this assignment done and submitted so believe me I will get it finished as soon as I can.

[carljokl]

Some potential interesting developments but nothing official yet.

Looking at technical problems again. My old Motorola V635 can store up to 4768K of data in persistent storage. This might be enough to store the standard works in. In ybk (yanceware format) the full scriptures with study helps comes to 9.45mb Without the study helps it is about 6.15mb. The YanceyWare text is stored in the form of HTML meaning quite a lot more verbose than just the text on it's own. However there is compression in use. If I also did not store any images and came up with a very compact binary format and also use compression for storing the data perhaps I could get the size down to fit in the 4768k constrains of the phone. It remains to be seen. At the worsed case it might mean older phones having to swap which scriptures they had stored in them to suit what the user was reading through at the time. The Book of Mormon will fit definitely. Perhaps there are higher efficiency compression algorithms too which could compress more. We shall see.

[carljokl]

It looks like I was able to delete old photos and music and freed up more space on the phone and the Java control panel now says I have access to over 7000K. This is more promising. It also might mean that the amount of space available to Java is not kept at a total fixed constraint but could be proportional to the total space available on the phone. It seems to be at least for this phone.

[carljokl]

I am probably going to need a new thread. This is no longer legalities albeit I haven't heard from the Church's intellectual property department but I should create a thread about technicalities. I just bought a cheap USB synch cable for my old V635 as I read it may let me delete the protected files on my phone to free up a bit more space.

[techgy]

I am probably going to need a new thread. This is no longer legalities albeit I haven't heard from the Church's intellectual property department but I should create a thread about technicalities. I just bought a cheap USB synch cable for my old V635 as I read it may let me delete the protected files on my phone to free up a bit more space.

Carl,

I don't know how quick of a response you were expecting, but I'd suggest that you give this some time. Perhaps several days. The brethren do not always respond quickly to everyone's questions and often take the time to discuss things before responding.

[kennethjorgensen]

I am probably going to need a new thread. This is no longer legalities albeit I haven't heard from the Church's intellectual property department but I should create a thread about technicalities. I just bought a cheap USB synch cable for my old V635 as I read it may let me delete the protected files on my phone to free up a bit more space.

Carl, you have achieved a lot in a short space of time so now lean back, breathe , finish your Sun assignment and wait for the church to come back to you. Like my colleague Techgy said give it some time. If you dont hear from them in 1-2 week's then you have my suggestion of what to do next.

[carljokl]

Well that is worth bearing in mind. have started doing some tests on the capacity of Record Store with read devices and the initial results have been disappointing. It looks like it may be much as I feared with the space available per MIDlet suite being very constrained. My old Motorola V635 is reporting a mere 15K of space available in the RecordStore. My new HTC Touch Pro has a more generous but still limited 2meg limit reported from JBlend. The Sun JavaFX preview SDK is most generous which is sure not to be typical and offers me 130mb of space.

I am sorry if I have been going a bit quickly. I am used to the culture of the business world in which I work where it seems the boss wants everything and wants it yesterday. Lots of pressure with little let up. Sometimes I can forget that other organisations are not like that.

[kennethjorgensen]

I am sorry if I have been going a bit quickly. I am used to the culture of the business world in which I work where it seems the boss wants everything and wants it yesterday. Lots of pressure with little let up. Sometimes I can forget that other organisations are not like that.

I think you will find most of us work in a similar environment as yourself and that goes for the church as well.

I don't think it's a case of "other organisations are not like that" but rather that most places are naturally fast to want things done for themselves and much slower at doing things for others.

[kennethjorgensen]

It would seem from this post that YanceyWare does not have any permission from the church to use the scriptures. On the other hand the church do make other material available (such as The Ensign etc) in the ybk format via lds.org.

So for me I will have to wait patiently until the church comes out with further information about their plans for the Scripture API.

Having a reader that can read both the ybk format (for offline viewing) and access the church's web services would seen ideal in many aspects.

[lajackson]

It would seem from this post that YanceyWare does not have any permission from the church to use the scriptures. On the other hand the church do make other material available (such as The Ensign etc) in the ybk format via lds.org.

So for me I will have to wait patiently until the church comes out with further information about their plans for the Scripture API.

Having a reader that can read both the ybk format (for offline viewing) and access the church's web services would seen ideal in many aspects.

Keep in mind that the only official electronic version of the scriptures in PDA format is the version that works in EZReader that is no longer supported. So, if you are going to have the scriptures on your PDA in any format other than that, you will not have an "official" version of the scriptures.

And I do not know what arrangements, if any, the other versions have regarding permissions for use. I think if I were to ask the question and follow it through, I would wind up taking the scriptures off of my PDA if I were not still using EZReader.